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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25527898">Just Like Magic</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/waylesssad/pseuds/waylesssad'>waylesssad</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Fluff, Friendship, Humor, Light Angst, M/M, Slow Burn, Young Dumb Wizards Trying Their Best</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 08:01:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>38,095</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25527898</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/waylesssad/pseuds/waylesssad</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a lot more to magic than waving your wand and saying a few funny words.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Chris Kendall/PJ Liguori, Dan Howell/Phil Lester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Year One</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The Harry Potter AU that no one asked for but hopefully everyone wanted.</p><p>Irrelevant disclaimer #1: I wrote this in 2016 with the full intention of immediately translating it into English and then didn't. So if the references feel slightly dated it's because a) they are from four years ago and b) we're all dying.</p><p>Irrelevant disclaimer #2: Everyone is the same age for storyline purposes. Don't judge me.</p><p>This is my baby and I'm very excited to finally share it with the world. If you find any mistakes, please let me know: I'm my own beta and not a native English speaker, I'm just trying my best.</p><p>I hope you'll come to love this as much as I do.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dan can’t believe his eyes. He’s been in Diagon Alley for nearly three hours now, but he’s still afraid that the shrieking and cruel sound of his alarm will rip him out of this magical dream any minute now.</p><p>Actually, Dan stops believing his eyes – ears, nose, fingers, tongue, and intuition for good measure – about a week ago, when a bright red letter flies – <em>flies</em> – into the brightly lit living room and announces in a colourless voice that he has been accepted into the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After that, the letter makes a polite pause and waits patiently for Dan’s mum to stop screaming about the devil’s antics and for Dan’s dad to stop looking around for his shotgun, and then adds that the list of books and other necessary stuff can be found attached and that on the first of September Dan should be at King’s Cross to get on the train to school. Upon finishing its monologue, the letter opens with a quiet rustle, leaving a very astonished Howell family to look at several parchment pieces filled with green ink.</p><p>For a week, a lot of which Dan spends trying to convince himself that what happened did actually happen, a lot of efforts go into persuading his parents that they don’t need a family counselling session (“I know you have a creative imagination, dear, but seeing red envelopes is never a good sign”). When his dad finally stops attempting to shoot the letter that’s long been silent with his newly found shotgun ‘just in case’, they all go to London to buy Dan all sorts of magical things.</p><p>Diagon Alley cannot be found on any map, and they spend a lot of time arguing that it means that it doesn’t exist altogether and this whole magic thing is just one big family hallucination. In the end, they end up getting help from the owner of a tiny bar, which Dan somehow manages to notice amidst the tall buildings of Central London. Following the instructions given in the letter, they exchange pounds for wizard money, and Dan’s mum keeps commenting under her breath about the unnecessary golden coins, while Dan’s dad refuses to walk into the bank when he sees goblins behind the counter. Dan himself can’t stop looking at white marble floors, glistening in the light of hundreds of floating candles, at weirdly shaped coins, piling over the familiar papers with the Queen’s face on them, and at the ever-serious goblins bending over thick accounting books. After finishing with boring formalities, they step outside on the street… and here they are. Dan can’t believe his eyes.</p><p>He stands in the Madam Malkin’s Robes For All Occasions completely alone – his parents, exhausted by the hooting of the owls in Eeylops Owl Emporium, the smell of frog spawn in the dark of the Apothecary, and strange book names like <em>The Handbook of Hippogriff Psychology</em> and <em>The Noble Sport of Warlocks</em> in Flourish and Blotts, refused to go with him and were waiting for him on the street. Madam Malkin has already taken all the necessary measurements and, pinching his cheek, disappeared inside the shop, so Dan has a moment to take a deep breath and try and convince himself for the hundred and fourteenth time that this is all actually happening. They have really bought a shiny copper cauldron for potions and wondrously precise scales for ingredients. He really has a wand now – a <em>wand</em>, even though it’s immediately taken away by his mum who is sure that he’ll start waving it around and poke someone’s eye out. The attempts to convince himself of this reality don’t really lead anywhere, and Dan finds himself grinning from ear to ear. Maybe this isn’t a dream, after all.</p><p>Dan is startled by the bell and he glances at the door to see another customer, a boy with dark ginger hair who looks just as scared and excited as Dan feels. His mum shouts something at him from the street, but the boy just waves his hand at her and tentatively steps inside. When he notices Dan, he smiles.</p><p>“Going to Hogwarts too?” Dan nods and awkwardly smiles back. “It’s my first year,” the boy tells him. “Martyn can’t stop saying how wonderful and magical everything in there is, so I really can’t wait to see how much of what he said is a complete lie.”</p><p>“Are your parents wizards?”</p><p>The question is out there before Dan can stop himself, and he’s filled with horror. What if that was rude? Impolite? Unacceptable? However, the boy just nods, and Dan nearly sways with excitement: he’s talking to an actual wizard from an actual wizarding family.</p><p>“And some great wizards, too,” the boy adds with the obvious pride. “My dad once transfigured one of those giant noisy Muggle things with propellers out a kitchen table, can you believe that? And it was able to fly, too! Mum was mad that it knocked down half the trees in our garden, but what can you expect from a thing like that?</p><p><em>Transfigured? Muggle?</em> Unfamiliar words still seem more exciting than scary, but Dan doesn’t get the time to ask what they mean because the boy keeps talking.</p><p>“What about your parents?” he asks with interest, and for the first time today, Dan feels something that is not absolute joy. This boy is so sure that his parents also do something extraordinary for a living, like turning everyday objects into helicopters, but Dan knows that’s not true at all. Everything that his family does seems boring in the wizarding world.</p><p>“Well, my dad’s a lawyer,” Dan says anyway, preparing to see the disappointment on the boy’s face, “and my mum’s an accountant, but she’s usually at home with Adrian… It’s my younger brother,” he adds. To his surprise, the boy’s eyes light up.</p><p>“An acc-… Are you a muggle?”</p><p>Dan looks at him questioningly. “A muggle?”</p><p>“A person who can’t do magic,” the boy explains and still looks at Dan as if he just properly saw him for the first time. “Martyn always tells me that he has two Muggleborns in his year and they are better than him at everything! Of course, I don’t know how good Martyn is, because he’s not allowed to do magic outside of Hogwarts yet, plus all his stories are really exaggerated and he probably can’t do anything at all, but still…”</p><p>Listening to the boy talk about his, apparently, older brother, Dan can’t help but smile and breathe a sigh of relief. It seems like his non-magical family doesn’t make him boring or uninteresting and also doesn’t define his future at Hogwarts.</p><p>Madam Malkin finally reappears from the back of the shop and calls him over to give him a pile of new black robes.</p><p>“Here you go, dear,” she smiles and waits patiently for Dan to count the still unfamiliar money. “Have a nice year!”</p><p>Dan manages to give her the right amount of coins and turns to leave, glancing again at the boy who already has Madam Malkin fussing around him with rulers and tape measures.</p><p>“My name’s Phil, by the way,” the boy says, waving away a particularly annoying magical pencil. “Phil Lester.”</p><p>“I’m Dan. Dan Howell.”</p><p>The boy – Phil – smiles and waves at him. “See you at Hogwarts, Dan!”</p><p>Dan awkwardly waves back and runs to the sunlit street, nearly tripping over his own feet.</p><p>***</p><p>The next time Dan sees Phil is on the Platform 9 ¾ and smiles, remembering their brief meeting at Madam Malkin’s. That moment has been slightly overshadowed by a variety of others, including the one where Dan’s mum found out that they have to run through a brick wall to get to the platform and for the hundredth time tried to persuade Dan not to go and do ‘all that wizard stuff’. In addition to that, Dan’s dad in all seriousness promised to call the police and the fire brigade in case they don’t return from behind the barrier in ten minutes, but something tells Dan that he still won’t forget the first time he met a wizard his age for a very long time. He sees Phil on the other side of the Platform surrounded by his family: his mother, a short witch in light green robes who is saying something to a boy slightly taller than Phil (his brother Martyn, Dan guesses), and his father, a thin wizard wearing dark blue robes and glasses. When they come closer trying to find an empty carriage, Dan overhears bits of the conversation.</p><p>“…so no chocolate frogs on the train this year!” Phil’s mum finishes what was, apparently, a very long motherly lecture and gives both her sons a stern look. “I don’t want to receive any more Howlers, do you understand?” Once they both nod, she continues, but softer, “Martyn, dear, do look after Phil. You know how hard the very first year can be.”</p><p>‘Don’t worry, Mum,” Martyn grins and stretches out his hand to ruffle Phil’s hair. Phil rolls his eyes. “I’ll be the perfect older brother. By the way, if you’re not sorted into Gryffindor, we’ll disown you,” he turns to Phil, making a serious face. “But, you know, no pressure.”</p><p>“Martyn!”</p><p>“Just a joke, Mum.”</p><p>Their mother just sighs and turns her attention to Phil, letting her husband say goodbye to Martyn.</p><p>“Just be good, Phil, I know you can do that,” she smiles warmly at him and tugs him in for a hug. “And listen to your brother, but don’t take to heart everything he says.”</p><p>“Will do,” Phil mutters, his nose on his mother’s shoulder.</p><p>Dan can’t hear anything else because there’s a loud whistle, and the noises on the Platform get louder. The parents are trying to give the last advice to their children, who are leaving for the first or the last time, and the students are climbing into the carriages, pushing their suitcases and owl cages in front of them, and Dan himself gets a bone-crushing hug from his Mum, and she once again reminds him that if he changes his mind, he can come back home any second and ‘please send us letters, even with those god awful owls, I just want to know that you’re alright’. There is another whistle, and Dan jumps in the carriage with all the other students and waves at his Mum from the window. She waves back and then looks at her watch and quickly heads to the barrier, as if concerned that Dan’s Dad wasn’t joking about the fire brigade. The train slowly leaves the station, and the Platform filled with witches and wizards disappears from sight. Dan finds a free compartment and sits down, feeling his fingers shake with excitement. He’s going to be at Hogwarts in just a few hours.</p><p>***</p><p>When dozens of little boats with the first years, led by Hagrid, start moving across the Great Lake, the excitement in Dan’s stomach turns to nerves. What if he got the letter by mistake and actually he’s not a wizard? On the train, he overhears a girl with a big bushy pile of hair animatedly telling someone about the Sorting Ceremony, and it is then when he has his first shadow of doubt: what if this all-knowing Hat just laughs at him, like, <em>how could you even think that this was real?</em> Dan sees that girl now, she’s sitting in the boat next to him and impatiently drumming her fingers on its side, undoubtedly counting seconds until their arrival. Dan almost considers jumping in the Lake and swimming back to London.</p><p>When they pass the bridge and see the castle for the first time, Dan forgets all his fears.</p><p>There’s still a couple of hundred meters of distance left, but Hogwarts is already standing tall in front of them, ancient and dark, but instead of looking gloomy it looks friendly and welcoming, promising homely warmth. Dan stares at the castle, mouth wide open in awe, and tries to count the little lights that make this enormous building so bright. He looks at the towers, big and small with pointy tops aimed towards the sky, and wants to know where is the owlery with owls that will take his letters home, which one is the Astronomy Tower where he’ll be looking at the stars through a telescope that he spent twenty minutes choosing, and, of course, where’s the dormitory of his future House. Dan knows that there are four Houses in Hogwarts but still barely even knows their names; he wanted to find Phil on the train and talk to him some more, but he couldn’t see him anywhere at first and then the carriages filled with older students who were already dressed in school robes and were discussing upcoming exams, so Dan couldn’t muster the courage to leave his compartment.</p><p>Still, the boats reach the shore all too quickly, and when Hagrid knocks at the heavy wooden doors, Dan feels nervous again. Seeing a stern-looking woman, whom Hagrid calls Professor McGonagall, only scares him more, and she takes them to a little room, where they are told to wait for a few minutes. When she leaves, the first years start talking in whispers that eventually grow into loud voices, and although Dan is glad to know that he isn’t the only one practically shaking with panic, it does nothing to calm his nerves.</p><p>“Dan!”</p><p>Phil appears in front of him, looking equally excited and terrified, and Dan sighs with relief before smiling back at him.</p><p>“Wow, I can’t believe we’re finally here, you know?” Phil glances around the room in awe, and in any other situation Dan wouldn’t have understood his enthusiasm – brick walls, brick floors, a window, a couple of lamps dimply lighting the room – but in here everything seems magical. “I nearly fell out of the boat on the way here. Thankfully, they were quick to drag me back in, I wouldn’t want to become the Squid’s dinner on the very first day.”</p><p>Dan laughs because Phil does look like someone who would fall out of the boat upon catching the first sight of Hogwarts, but doesn’t get the time to ask about the Squid. Something quacks in Phil’s robes, and he gets a baby toad out of his pocket.</p><p>“Is it yours?” Dan asks with interest.</p><p>“Yup,” Phil nods, petting the toad with his finger. “Mum’s allergic to cats and owls need special care or something, so I got Winston.” The toad quacks happily at the sound of his name, and Dan decides not to laugh because the first thing that he did to his own owl was naming her Zelda.</p><p>Only standing so close to Phil Dan realises that something about him changed. His smile is just as infectious when he’s telling a funny story about Winston, his eyes are still lit up with enthusiasm, and his black fringe is still too long…</p><p>“Wait a second,” Dan says abruptly, “wasn’t your hair ginger?”</p><p>Phil stops midsentence and turns a deep crimson colour.</p><p>“I don’t know what you mean,” he tries to sound nonchalant, but his voice rises higher.</p><p>“Oh come on,” Dan insists, not understanding why such a simple question produced such a weird reaction, “when we met at Madam Malkin’s, you had…”</p><p>“Phil?”</p><p>A skinny boy with dark curly hair steps out of one of the groups and looks at Phil as if trying to recognize him.</p><p>“PJ!” Phil exclaims with apparent relief, and the boy comes to them, clapping Phil on the shoulder. “I was afraid you fell out somewhere between London and Cambridge.”</p><p>“Not this year.” PJ winks at him. “And speaking about falling, nice try to feed the Squid earlier, Lester. I was impressed with how safe and flawless the execution was.”</p><p>“He looked hungry and I had cookies!” Phil waves his hands defensively and Winston quacks, unhappy with the sudden movement. Phil notices that Dan looks at PJ with interest and says hurriedly, “Yeah, Dan, this is PJ, my neighbour from Manchester. PJ, this is Dan, we met in the Diagon Alley.”</p><p>“It was very nice of you to leave out the fact that we are best friends forever,” PJ rolls his eyes and offers Dan a friendly smile. “Anyways, rumour has it that the Hat is ready to sing its song, so my advice to you is to get ready as well. See ya!”</p><p>Clapping Phil on the shoulder once again, PJ returns to his excitedly talking friends. Dan decides to continue tormenting Phil about his sudden hair changes some other time and wants to ask how exactly did he plan on feeding the Squid cookies, but Professor McGonagall comes back and orders them to form a line and follow her, so he has to postpone this discussion as well.</p><p>The Sorting Ceremony goes too slowly and too quickly at the same time. When they enter the Great Hall, everyone is looking at them and Dan kind of wants to fall through the floor only to escape from all the attention. Fortunately, soon all eyes move to the Hat, who sings something about friendship and understanding, dreams and hard work, the founders of Hogwarts and the Houses named after them; Dan does not catch the details because his ears ring from the nerves and he almost forgets to clap when the song ends. Professor McGonagall uncurls a long scroll with the names of the first years and starts calling them out one by one, and Dan’s mind goes blank.</p><p>He looks at Phil when he, pale as a ghost, moves to the front and fidgets on the chair as the Hat is put on his head. The Hat is silent for only a few seconds and then it yells, “HUFFLEPUFF!”, and Phil runs to the table decorated with yellow flags, stumbling on his way, and his brother gives him the thumbs up from the Gryffindor table. PJ comes immediately after him and doesn’t look much more confident, and the Hat sends him to Ravenclaw, causing the blue table to erupt in applause. All other faces look the same and melt into one, and after Carrie Fletcher, the girl who talked about the Sorting on the train, goes to the Gryffindor table, Dan hears his own name.</p><p>The Hat doesn’t start laughing at him and doesn’t let everyone in the Great Hall know that he is a liar and an impostor with no magical abilities; instead, it softly chuckles in his ear, “Well, of course. SLYTHERIN!”</p><p>Dan manages to stand up without falling and, barely registering cheers and applause, makes his way to the table near the wall decorated in silver and green. Phil happily waves at him from his own table and Dan can’t help but smile back. He all but falls on the bench and only then is able to breathe again.</p><p>“Well, the hardest part is behind us,” the boy next to him, probably also a first-year, winks at him. Dan can only nod, practically melting with relief. He really did it. He’s not going anywhere. He’s a real wizard. “I’m Chris Kendall,” the boy offers him a hand and Dan readily shakes it.</p><p>“Dan Howell.”</p><p>“Okay, Dan,” Chris says, while Professor McGonagall folds the parchment and takes the Sorting Hat out of the Great Hall, “you can start getting attached to me now because we’ll be seeing a hell of a lot of each other in the next seven years.”</p><p>***</p><p>Days at Hogwarts are fantastically unlike the days that Dan used to spend at his old school in Reading, where he was falling asleep during Maths, blankly staring out of the window during English, or counting the minutes until the bell rings at Biology. Their very first class here is Charms, and Professor Flitwick stands on a pile of books so his head is visible over the teacher’s table and with one flick of his wand makes all their books go flying in the air; Dan exchanges excited glances with Chris, feeling ready to tackle any amount of theory that’ll make him able to do things like that. They have double Potions with the Gryffindors and Dan sits next to a boy called Felix, whose cauldron explodes four minutes into the lesson because he used a Valerian root instead of a Mandrake one. Professor Slughorn fixes Felix’s cauldron with a simple spell and tells him that it’s okay and that only an absolute genius could’ve managed to do everything right on the first try. Once he moves on to another table, Felix mutters something about ‘those damn Swedish genes’ that forbid him from becoming an absolute genius, and Dan can’t stop laughing. During Herbology they are working with the Hufflepuffs, and Phil always happily waves at him from behind the bizarre plants and Dan, who has never seen anything more exotic than a cactus, waves back at him with just as much enthusiasm and nearly knocks over a pot of fertilizer. Even the History of Magic, taught by Professor Binns who must have the most boring voice in the world, seems interesting to Dan and he diligently scribbles down dates of endless goblin wars and witch revolutions, while Chris next to him sleeps the lessons away, using the crisp white parchment as a pillow.</p><p>His free time doesn’t leave him disappointed either. PJ teaches him to play wizard chess that, much to Dan’s surprise, are a lot different from Muggle chess; those are not as chatty and the knights are less likely to offer pawns in exchange for their own freedom. Dan, of course, loses the first five games without standing any chance and Chris patronisingly pats him on the shoulder and tells him never to gamble, because ‘that stinky thief PJ will rob you of your last Knut’. When Dan goes to the Owlery for the first time to send his parents a letter, Phil comes along and meets Zelda, who gently pecks his hand while Dan hurriedly finishes writing. On that day they also find out that Winston, who has long claimed Phil’s pockets as his permanent residence, is incredibly curious but also incredibly scared of owls, so Phil has to pet him for several minutes after one of the school owls angrily hoots at him. And Dan quickly loses count of how many times they run away from Filch in the dark corridors because Chris wants to take a walk through the castle at night time or hide from Peeves in abandoned classrooms because PJ just likes to throw pebbles at him and yell, “Guess who!”, or have to tug Phil away from the Forbidden Forest because he thinks he sees a centaur or a unicorn. Dan gets used to the castle and its inhabitants very quickly and is no longer terrified when the Nearly Headless Nick floats by or when one of the portraits in the corridors suddenly speaks to him. He finds out which stairs change direction at three in the afternoon and learns to distinguish them from those which do that at half-past ten at night; he also realises that he needs to accept Hagrid’s cookies only out of politeness and that the tiny Madam Pince looks absolutely terrifying with a feather duster. New discoveries make the time fly by, and he barely notices that the first three months at Hogwarts have already passed and that it’s Christmas time.</p><p>On Christmas Eve they go to bed early, and Chris loudly announces that he’s drunk the Sleeping Potion just so he can fall asleep faster and be the first one to open the presents, but Dan can hear him tossing and turning until well after midnight. In the morning he wakes up because someone is jumping on his bed.<br/>
“Mmm?” he murmurs sleepily, refusing to open his eyes.</p><p>“Rise and shine!” Chris’s cheerful voice rings through the quiet dormitory. Dan feels his covers being tugged off of him and opens his eyes to see grinning Chris; there’s only two of them left, everyone else went home for the holidays, so he can be as loud as he wants. “If you sleep through Christmas, the Grinch will come and eat you!”</p><p>“Christmas doesn’t work like that,” Dan grumbles but sits up on the bed and focuses his attention on the pile of presents next to him.</p><p>“How dare you imply that I know nothing about Christmas!” Chris’s voice rises in mock offence. “For that, I won’t even open your present! Maybe this will make you understand how much you should cherish our friendship and how much you’re ought to appreciate…” Chris unwraps the present and its contents effectively cut off his monologue. “Oh man, the Headless Hat! Thanks, mate!”</p><p>“Merry Christmas,” Dan shrugs, but Chris is not listening anymore. He puts on the hat, which really makes his head disappear, and yells, “I’m off to scare Slughorn!”</p><p>Wishing Professor Slughorn to remain calm and collected during these trying times but thinking that that probably will not happen, Dan moves on to his own presents. He opens a gift from Chris first, afraid that something sentient, or worse, explosive will jump out if he isn’t quick enough. However, he is greeted with a new set of wizarding chess with a note that says, ‘So that you can finally do something about PJ and his corrupt knights’. There’s been a few times when he lost so hopelessly that PJ was running in joyous circles around the Great Hall, and Dan grins; apparently, Chris was more affected by it than any of them thought.</p><p>PJ gives him with socks that change colour depending on their owner’s mood. Dan quickly puts them on, which makes the socks become bright red, and discovers that he’s feeling ‘Christmassy and carefree’, according to the attached mood paper. Dan rolls his eyes at the phrasing but makes a mental note to thank PJ for adding colour to his otherwise black sock collection.</p><p>The last gift he opens is from Phil and it looks slightly bigger than the others. Unwrapping the paper, Dan sees a book titled <em>Tales of Beedle the Bard</em> and can’t help a smile. A couple of weeks ago he mentioned Red Riding Hood and was met with three pairs of questioning eyes. It took him ten minutes to try and explain that it’s just a Muggle fairy tale and not a horror story about a red-headed demon, and Phil still shook his head in doubt and promised to one day introduce him to ‘normal fairy tales’. Dan places the book on the bed and returns to the present, which also includes a little bag of homemade Christmas tree-shaped cookies. The note next to it says,</p><p>
  <em>I told Mum that you have never tried the wizard sweets and she wouldn’t leave me alone until I agreed to give you her cookies. She bakes them only for Christmas and they are very good, really.</em>
</p><p>Dan’s heart fills with warmth for Mrs Lester, a woman who has never seen him but still decided to introduce him to the Christmas in the wizarding world through cookies. He bites the top off of one of the trees; the cookies are amazing and he needs to send an owl to the Lesters with at least a hundred thank-yous.</p><p>There is one more envelope left on the floor and Dan picks it up to see that it’s a letter from his parents.</p><p>
  <em>Dear Dan,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Thank you for the frequent letters, we are very happy to hear that you are doing great. It is very important to find new friends, but studying is even more important, so do remember not to have too much fun. We do not understand a lot about your subjects, but if you like them, that is all that matters.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>We are spending the holidays at Aunt Angie’s, you surely remember your Aunt Angie? You and Adrian used to always play hide-and-seek in her cellar until you hit one of the barrels and had to get stitches on your knee. She asks about you all the time, it is very unusual for her to see Adrian alone, but she is very happy that you are doing good at school (we told her that you are away at a boarding school studying physics and maths; there is no reason to tell her about the magical stuff, she will not understand it anyway).</em>
</p><p>
  <em>We spent a long time thinking what to get you for Christmas but then realised that nothing from our world could possibly surprise you. You are in such a different place from home that anything we send you will look absolutely foreign. Enjoy the wizarding world, dear, gain knowledge and experience and come back to us in summer, filled with memories and positive emotions.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>We love you very, very much. Happy Christmas.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Mum, Dad, and Adrian.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>P.S. Adrian sends his thanks for the chocolate frogs. Although half of them escaped, while he was looking at the cards, so he asks you to please send some more. We liked them too.</em>
</p><p>The letter leaves Dan with mixed feelings. He’s happy to hear from his family; he’s glad that they’ve figured out how the owl post works, that they liked the sweets that he was so scared to send, that they seem pleased with his academic success, but… Dan rereads the part about Aunt Angie and it stings him a little bit. Aren’t proud parents supposed not to hide from the world what their child is really doing? Dan’s parents always wanted him to have interest in the exact sciences and even told him about the career as a lawyer that awaits him, but then came the letter from Hogwarts and now Dan is studying physics and maths only in his parents’ dreams. And the letter makes Dan realise that these dreams haven’t gone anywhere.</p><p>It seems that Chris has no plans of returning from his Slughorn-scaring mission any time soon, so Dan folds the letter and starts changing to go to breakfast. He can’t stop thinking about how Mrs Lester’s cookies brought him more joy than the letter from his own parents.</p><p>When he comes down to the Great Hall, Phil is already sitting at the Hufflepuff table in a knitted yellow scarf, eating cereal. He enthusiastically waves Dan over; there are so little people around that no one would mind him not sitting at his own table.</p><p>“Do you like it?” Phil asks, poking at his giant scarf. “My Mum made it. She wants everyone to know that I got into the House of the cool guys.”</p><p>Dan looks at the scarf in the colours of Hufflepuff and can’t suppress a smile. Of course, only Phil would call it that.</p><p>“I really like it,” he says honestly. Phil still notices that something’s wrong and frowns.</p><p>“What about your parents?” he asks cautiously.</p><p>“They sent me a letter describing their holidays at Aunt Angie’s. Apparently, she’s very happy to hear about how good I am at studying physics and maths.” Dan tries to sound nonchalant but something in his voice must betray him because Phil puts his spoon down on the table.</p><p>“Phys-…” he starts, confused, but quickly realises that’s not the root of the problem. “Oh.”</p><p> “Yeah,” Dan agrees, getting himself a plate and poking at the bacon with no interest. “I think they like all these magic things much less than they’re trying to show.”</p><p>“They’ll get used to it,” Phil assures him. “They have to, they’re your parents. For example, I didn’t have any magical abilities until I was, like, ten, and everyone was sure that I’m a Squib – a person who was born in a magical family but can’t do magic,” he elaborates at Dan’s confused look. “Anyway, even though Martyn was teasing me, Mum always said that it’s not a big deal and she will be proud of me either way. And the same will happen with your parents.”</p><p>Phil’s words make the tight knot in his chest loosen until it disappears altogether. This isn’t the first time when Dan notices that Phil has a truly magical ability to calm people down, and this trick cannot be learned from any book.</p><p>“So I could’ve been the one studying that physic thing,” Phil adds, his voice a little unsure. Dan snorts, imagining Phil doing equations, and Phil immediately looks relieved.</p><p>“You’d make a horrible physicist,” Dan says confidently. Phil crosses his arms, ready to argue.</p><p>“And why is that?”</p><p>Dan tells him about equations with unknowns because he heard something about them in school, about the Mendeleev’s table which hangs in the office at his house, about the atomic bomb because he used to scare little Adrian with it, and about electricity, even though the only thing he knows about it is that it makes the lights turn on. Phil claims that he has never in his life been afraid of the unknown and calls the table of ‘thingies’ a child’s toy. However, the atomic bomb makes him less confident in his abilities and, in the end, he reluctantly admits that he probably wouldn’t have been able to master electricity. Dan calls him a scientific disappointment until the end of breakfast, while Phil just rolls his eyes and hides his giggles in his scarf.</p><p>“Hey Phil,” Dan says when they are leaving the Great Hall. “Thanks.” Phil just shrugs and smiles, as if saying, <em>It’s nothing</em>. “By the way, your Mum makes amazing cookies.”</p><p>Phil’s smile grows bigger and brighter, and Dan forgets all about the letter.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Since the whole thing is finished, I'll be uploading one chapter a day throughout this week to try and create suspense because it's more fun this way. Let me know what you think and I'll see you tomorrow!</p><p>Alternative Chapter Title: Dan Howell and Now I'm Never Going To Be A Lawyer</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Year Two</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When Dan crawls out of bed one September morning, cursing himself for staying up way past midnight doing his Potions homework, he’s met by an array of excited voices coming from the announcement board.</p><p>“What’s going on?” he asks Chris sleepily. Chris, as he has learned in the past year and a half, has a magical ability to look cheerful and well-rested at any time of day and regardless of the situation.</p><p>“Quidditch trials,” Chris says. “This Friday. Almost all stars graduated last year and they really need someone fresh and talented to help the great Slytherin kick everyone’s butts once again.”</p><p>Dan nods, not even trying to hide his yawn, and remembers last year when Chris and PJ dragged him to every single game, making long speeches about house loyalty, love for the great sport, and spending time with your “bestest” friends, and refused to take no for an answer. Phil, who wanted to watch fourteen people throw balls at each other just as much as Dan, if not less, was forced to tag along as well, and more often than not they had to remind Chris and PJ to stay civil because their preferences and interests were too different for them to remain calm. Eventually, of course, Dan got used to the roar of the stadium, to the swishing of brooms in the air and his constantly arguing friends; he stopped mistaking a Bludger for a Quaffle, got the hang of Quidditch and even learned to enjoy it. However, he’d still trade going to the game for an hour in front of the common room fireplace with <em>Dreadful Denizens of the Deep</em> or a walk to the Lake with Phil that still kept trying to feed the Giant Squid with the remains of his breakfast.</p><p>“Are you going to try out?” he asks Chris, whose eyes still haven’t left the emerald announcement leaflet.</p><p>“If only I had a broom,” Chris sighs wistfully and turns away, casting one last sorrowful gaze at the leaflet. Dan met his mother at King’s Cross a few weeks earlier: she was a lovely woman with kind eyes and a dreadful fear of flying. Chris was at his wits’ end trying to persuade her that more people are killed by donkeys each year than from falling off a broom, but even an extensive list of all the pros of Quidditch couldn’t make her change her mind. During his first week at Hogwarts, Chris, of course, snuck out to the broom shed and, after almost flying headfirst into the Quidditch hoops and getting dangerously close to the Whomping Willow, made Dan promise that he’ll never even think about this incident in the presence of his mother. “What about you, young Daniel?” He turns to Dan, seemingly already forgotten about his woes. “Have I ignited in you a passion for the sport of the noble, the brave, and the reckless, the sport in which you dive deep, like in the murky waters of the Great Lake, and emerge with your head held high, trophies in your hands, and…”</p><p>“You’re not that persuasive.” Dan rolls his eyes; he’s not sure Chris himself knows where his speech is going.</p><p>“I’m offended beyond words!” Chris clutches his chest with one hand, using the other to point an accusatory finger at Dan. “I spent hours teaching you the ancient secrets of this sport, and this is how you repay me?”</p><p>“Just be happy that we still agree to be seen in public with you,” Dan rolls his eyes once more and heads out of the common room to go to breakfast. “Especially after last year’s game against Ravenclaw when you broke a bench in your excitement and PJ was so hurt by that that he refused to speak to you for a week.”</p><p>“Hey, that peasant was fantastically wrong!” Chris exclaims and throws his hands in the air. “Listen, you were there and saw everything with your own two eyes, so tell me, how could Madam Hooch <em>not</em> make it a penalty when one of those lousy Chasers grabbed the broom of our Shane with their lousy hands? She couldn’t, of course, so I said to PJ, in a calm and rational manner…”</p><p>It’s easy for Dan to tune him out; he’s already heard this story at least seven times so he lets Chris ramble on, knowing full well that he’s going to shut up as soon as they enter the Great Hall and he sees eggs with bacon. They don’t talk about Quidditch anymore until the second break when they see PJ, who cheerfully waves at them and lets them know that yes, Ravenclaw’s also having trials but no, he’s not going to participate, because watching from the stands is much more interesting, and actually they are starting in five minutes and Sophie, his friend from Charms and Transfiguration, is trying out to be a Chaser, so he needs to go but will definitely see them after classes. Once PJ disappears behind the corner, Chris snorts and calls him a betrayer, which gets him a poke in the shoulder from Dan and a reminder that they’re going to be late for Potions.</p><p>After lunch, they have Herbology and see Phil for the first time. As soon as Professor Sprout finishes talking about mandrakes, he comes up to them and whispers, eyes full of glee, “I’m going to try out for Quidditch!”</p><p>Dan drops a pot full of fertilizer on the floor and Chris very impolitely bursts out laughing, not even trying to hide behind his protective gloves.</p><p>“You?” Dan asks in disbelief after cleaning up the mess. “You, Phil Lester, that still trips on the same spot at the same staircase every morning?”</p><p>“You, Phil Lester, that once got tangled up in his own sheets and decided that he’s being attacked?” Chris joins in, also unsure if he’s heard Phil right.</p><p>“That nearly walked into the Whomping Willow because he got distracted by a bird?”</p><p>“That slid three feet across the third-floor corridor because he didn’t notice the ‘wet floor’ sign?”</p><p>“That got so excited about seeing Mars that he collided with his telescope and had a black eye for three days?”</p><p>“That has nearly fallen out of the Owlery window approximately sixty-two times, and…”</p><p>“Yeah, sure, thanks for the support,” Phil rolls his eyes. Dan would feel sorry for him if he wasn’t too busy laughing remembering how Phil looked like with a black eye. “And wait, sixty-two?” His voice raises in concern. “Have you been counting?”</p><p>“Simply guesstimating,” Chris tells him comfortingly and wipes away tears of laughter, finally putting on his protective gloves. “Back to the question, though, are you serious? I thought after that flying lesson you’d never want to look at a broom again.”</p><p>Dan’s thoughts go back to last year and he can’t help but agree with Chris: for Phil, the first flying lesson was nothing short of a disaster. It all went wrong from the start, when Phil got too nervous and confused his left with his right, which ended up with him standing next to the wrong broom. When he shouted, “Up!”, two brooms attempted to jump into his hands at once, leaving Dodie, a muggle-born girl from Hufflepuff that was standing next to him, to helplessly stare at the ground, not understanding why her broom was in the air even before she opened her mouth. Once that situation got sorted out and Madam Hooch allowed them to try actually flying, Phil, still too nervous, started running instead of pushing up in the air, and his broom, unhappy with such incompetence, decided to take matters in its own hands (wicks?) and charged towards a brick wall with incredible speed. Luckily, Madam Hooch managed to stop the broom in time with a flick of her wand and told Phil, who was frightened within an inch of his life, to just stand on the ground until the end of the lesson because she doesn’t want to ‘send him to the hospital wing in separate parts’. After that Phil, ever the optimist, has been joking that he’ll find his calling in life not dangling seven feet above the ground, but the lesson did leave him shaken up enough to forget about flying for a while.</p><p>“Yeah, but that was a year ago,” Phil waves the memory away with his hand. “Maybe there’s a great player inside me and I can never let him out until I try? Harry Potter, for example, didn’t know anything about Quidditch until he first got on a broom, and then he became the coolest Seeker ever. Maybe I can be like that too.”</p><p>Dan tries not to roll his eyes: <em>only</em> Phil could come up with an explanation like that.</p><p>“Harry Potter also didn’t know that he could fight evil wizards until he defeated a few,” he snorts. “Don’t you want to fight a few bad guys while you’re at it, hm?”</p><p>Phil doesn’t have time to respond because Professor Sprout tells them to put ear mufflers on and start replanting mandrakes, but that doesn’t stop him from dropping a bag of fertilizer on Dan’s foot with an innocent expression on his way. Dan, in turn, laughs way too loudly when Phil can’t get a very stubborn mandrake out of the pot and loses sight of his own plant that immediately bites his finger, sending Phil into a fit of giggles. When his finger stops pulsating with pain, Dan decides that this makes them even.</p><p>When the fateful day at the end of the week comes, Phil still hasn’t changed his mind so Dan, Chris, and PJ head to the stands after breakfast, cheese toasts in hand. The Slytherin team holds their tryouts first, and green cloaks fly around the stadium, tossing the Quaffle to each other, and then wait with bated breath when three potential Seekers start their chase for the Snitch.</p><p>“Regret not being out there yet?” Chris smirks and nudges Dan with his elbow when the captain, the fifth-year student Alfie Deyes that’s already sporting a beard, gathers everyone around to announce who’s made the team.</p><p>“Maybe next year,” Dan shrugs noncommittally and takes a bite of his toast. Quidditch still doesn’t seem like ‘the best sport to ever exist, ever’, but watching fellow students float in mid-air makes him think that it’s so easy, dodging Bludgers and other players, and he promises himself to get on a broom at least once - if not for sport, then just for fun.</p><p>PJ gestures at the field, yanking Dan away from his thoughts: the Slytherins in green and silver have left and now it’s full of the Hufflepuffs, dressed in canary yellow. Phil is easy to spot, already head and shoulders above everyone else in his year; he notices them right away and cheerfully waves, almost tripping over his broom. Dan and PJ exchange meaningful looks and Chris makes sure that his facepalm is extra dramatic. The captain of the Hufflepuff team (his name is Jim, Dan thinks) shoots them a disapproving look but doesn’t consider a bunch of second-years a threat and no longer pays attention to them.</p><p>It quickly becomes apparent that the Hufflepuffs aren’t messing around this year. The first couple of people that couldn’t fly through the hoops get sent back to the stands, and they are quickly joined by a few more that didn’t manage to fly around the field while holding a Quaffle, and then it’s Phil's turn. He looks less and less confident in his hidden talents by the minute.</p><p>Jim tells him something and stands back, crossing his arms. Phil takes his broom with shaking hands, manages to get on it without tripping, and pushes up from the ground, holding in the air with surprising confidence. Jim nods, and Phil, with the expression of surprise and relief on his face, flies forward, his fingers tightly gripping the broomstick.</p><p>“Wow, colour me impressed,” Chris mutters, astonishment apparent in his voice. Dan can’t help but agree: he wasn’t sure Phil’d be able to get in the air without something going wrong. “Please remind me never to try and charm my own motherwort again; this thing is obviously doing something with my perception of reality.”</p><p>PJ kicks him in the shin.</p><p>“Phil’s flying really well,” he says with interest, not paying attention to pouting Chris. “Where did he learn that? I’d have to as-...”</p><p>Then Phil’s broom suddenly leans sideways, and he clumsily falls onto the wet grass. Dan sighs.</p><p>“Well, it doesn’t matter,” PJ ends his thought with a polite smile.</p><p>***</p><p>“But I was so sure I could do it,” Phil says dejectedly on the way to the castle. After he fell off the broom, Jim very politely told him that he’s not a good fit for the team right now and sent him to the stands, turning his attention to the more successful candidates.</p><p>“And you did it!” Chris soothes him and claps him on the shoulder.</p><p>“Those first thirty seconds of flight were god-like,” Dan agrees.</p><p>“I couldn’t have done it better myself,” PJ adds. Phil rolls his eyes at the words of support and still doesn’t smile.</p><p>“It doesn’t matter anymore. I didn’t even last a minute on that thing.” He casts a sad look at his broom. Suddenly Chris grabs PJ by the elbow and hauls him ahead, frantically whispering something in his ear.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Dan says quietly after being left alone with Phil, who still looks like he wants to smack himself with his own broom. “You wanted it that badly, huh?”</p><p>Phil sighs. “Martyn found Dad’s old broom when he was seven and flew immediately. We had to come to get him from the neighbouring county,” he chuckles a little. “And you’ve seen him play. I think I even heard ‘the best Beater in Gryffindor in the last decade’ about him. So yes, I really wanted it, but it turned out,” he looks at his feet, “as it always does.”</p><p>Dan can’t think of anything to say to that because Chris comes back, with PJ looking like he’s accepted his fate in tow and a sly glint in his eyes.</p><p>“How are we doing?” he asks matter-of-factly. When Phil gives him a <em>how-do-you-think</em> look, he lifts up his hands defensively. “Alrighty. Just as I thought. Let’s go, I know a place where you’ll forget all your sorrows.”</p><p>Dan sends PJ a questioning look, who just shrugs and goes after Chris that’s already disappeared in the castle, and decides to blindly trust him once again. Chris’s love for adventures backfired on them more than once; just last April he tried to conjure a swamp in the Charms corridor, trying out his new jokester kit from Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes that he got for Christmas, and they all had to spend a week cleaning green sticky goo from the floors and the walls because Chris’s magical powers were still very unpredictable. But hanging out with Chris is always a good time, and right now it almost hurts Dan to look at how upset Phil is, so they have no choice but to follow him in the castle.</p><p>Using some secret corridors, Chris brings them to a part of the dungeons where Dan’s never been before. Their common room and Slughorn’s office are probably on the other side of the castle, but Chris confidently leads the way, turning right near a knight dressed in weirdly shaped armour, then left next to a portrait of soundly sleeping monks, then left again right behind a statue of a griffin with its wings up, then right near another knight, and then Dan loses track of the turns. A few minutes later they come to a dead end with a painting of a fruit bowl on the wall, almost inappropriately bright in the darkness. Dan opens his mouth to ask why he brought them all the way here just to look at the fruit but before he can do that, Chris smiles mysteriously and reaches his hand out to tickle a green pear. The pear giggles and turns into a door handle.</p><p>“Welcome,” Chris announces dramatically, pushing the handle, “to the Hogwarts kitchens.”</p><p>Dan forgets all the questions that he has (including the newest and the most urgent <em>how on earth did you ever get into the kitchen and why are you letting us know only now?</em>) when Chris, looking very pleased with himself, opens the door and leads them in. They end up in a massive room with long tables, full of busy-looking elves that are doing everything from polishing forks and plates to putting something delicious-smelling into a giant oven taking up the whole of the back wall. Out of the corner of his eye, Dan notices that Phil’s mood improves immediately as he tries to look in every direction at once, regretting not having another pair of eyes.</p><p>“Master Kendall!”</p><p>One of the elves runs up to Chris and bows, his long ears nearly touching the floor. Chris awkwardly lowers his gaze.</p><p>“I told you, we can move past this whole ‘master’ stuff, Sarn. How are you?”</p><p>“Can’t complain, sir,” the elf replies, and Dan can’t tear his eyes away. His height reaches just above Dan’s knee, his eyes and ears are almost comically big, he’s wearing a towel with the Hogwarts emblem on it, and he looks at them like they are the guests of honour. “What can we do for you?”</p><p>“One of my friends,” Chris points at Phil that keeps looking around like a kid in the candy shop, “is having a bad day. What do you think, can we fix that?”</p><p>The elf jumps up in excitement, his ears flapping from the movement. “We just finished up a batch of fresh eclairs, sir! Just a moment!”</p><p>Sarn disappears in the opposite end of the kitchen while a few other elves take them to the table set up near the fireplace. Before Dan can understand what is happening, he’s already holding a cup of tea and Sarn is coming back with a tray of eclairs, cakes, and biscuits. He puts the tray on the table as all other elves bow, and returns to work, leaving them to stare at Chris who looks like a cat near a plate of cream.</p><p>“<em>How?</em>” PJ sums all their thoughts up; apparently, he didn’t know that Chris is friends with the Hogwarts elves either. Chris, in turn, takes a sip of his tea and smiles victoriously.</p><p>“Oh, and you need to know everything.” Under Dan’s unimpressed glare, and probably his own desire to boast, he relents. “I got lost here last year and accidentally touched that pear in the painting. Almost crapped myself when it giggled,” he lowers his voice to a whisper as if letting them in on a dark secret. “And the elves helped me find the way out and also gave me a bunch of bagels to go. I’ve been here a lot since then and they are really happy; they say no one comes around anymore, this generation of students really lacks curiosity.”</p><p>“Of course no one knows about the kitchen,” PJ grumbles. “You didn’t even tell us.”</p><p>“A man needs to have his secrets, my dear Peej,” Chris says solemnly or attempts to because he chokes on a biscuit and starts coughing. “How dare you laugh at my manliness?” he manages between wheezes while PJ is giggling at him from behind his cup.</p><p>“Oh, you want to talk about manliness?” PJ asks, a playful glint in his eyes. Chris makes a battle cry and tries to tackle him to the floor.</p><p>The fireplace is pleasantly warm, his cup refills itself, and Phil looks happy again, reaching out for his third eclair, and Dan decides that even if those two destroy the kitchen, he can live with that.</p><p>***</p><p>The next time they talk about Phil’s unsuccessful tryouts is in winter when Hufflepuff plays Ravenclaw. The temperatures are way below zero and the wind is so strong it’s almost a hurricane; Hufflepuff wins with a ten-point margin and Phil just says, “Thank <em>god</em> I didn’t make it.” Dan nods, wrapped in the scarf up to his eyes, and it doesn’t come up anymore.</p><p>Christmas doesn’t bring any surprises. Dan gets another box of sweets from Mrs Lester and spends forty minutes on a thank-you letter, crossing out sentences that don’t sound grateful enough while Chris eats a lollipop and calls him a mama’s boy. When they come down for dinner, Phil waves at them from the Hufflepuff table, wearing a bright yellow jumper, and Chris has to drag Dan away to their table before he starts admiring the knitting skills of Phil’s mum as a way of saying thank you.</p><p>The day before the semester starts Dan is sitting in the empty library and trying to remember any of the things they covered in the Potions class this year. Students that left for the holidays aren’t back yet and PJ is still in Italy with his parents, and Chris was caught throwing confetti around the Transfiguration classroom by very displeased Filch (according to Chris, the class wasn’t festive enough and he was going to blame it on Peeves) and is now polishing ancient awards in the Trophy Room, so the only thing keeping Dan company is <em>Magical Drafts and Potions</em>. Slughorn loves starting the first lesson after a break with a quiz and Dan is determined to go over at least some of his notes, but then Phil appears from behind the shelves, doing a very poor job of looking nonchalant.</p><p>“What are you up to?” Dan asks as soon as Phil takes a seat opposite him. Phil’s face immediately falters.</p><p>“Is it that obvious?”</p><p>“You’d be the world’s worst spy,” Dan giggles and lightly shoves Phil under the table with his foot so he stops sulking. “What’s up?”</p><p>Phil pretends to be offended for two whole seconds before leaning in and whispering, “You know about the Mirror of Erised, right?”</p><p>Dan gives himself a mental high five for reading <em>Hogwarts: A History</em> in summer and not looking like an idiot now.</p><p>“The one that shows people their deepest desires?”</p><p>“No, there’s another one that predicts what you’re going to have for breakfast the next day.” Phil gets another kick and an <em>okay mr sarcasm</em> from Dan and returns to the mysterious whisper. “I found it.”</p><p>Dan leans back in his chair and looks at him in disbelief. “No, you didn’t.”</p><p>“I did!” Phil exclaims, forgetting where they are for a second. “I wanted to see if Chris really wrecked the Transfiguration classroom and took a wrong turn… three times,” he adds under Dan’s knowing gaze. “And it was just standing there, all big and dusty, and there was something written on it in a weird language. Obviously, it’s not a regular mirror.”</p><p>“And you immediately decided that it’s the Mirror of Erised?” Dan asks, a hint of doubt still in his voice. <em>Hogwarts: A History</em> told him that the Mirror was very well hidden after they removed the Philosopher’s Stone from it, and he has reasons to believe that ‘very well hidden’ doesn’t mean ‘people still see it around all the time’. “Maybe it’s just some old mirror?”</p><p>“It is the Mirror of Erised,” Phil says with conviction, refusing to listen to logic. “And I can show you! Unless you’d rather sit here with,” he turns one of the books on the table over to see the name, “<em>Encyclopedia of Toadstools</em> than uncover scary ancient secrets.”</p><p>Dan rolls his eyes but still stretches and gets up. He probably won’t get any revision done but it’s not like he’s terribly upset about it.</p><p>“Well, if you put it that way.” He points an accusatory finger at Phil. “And don’t look so smug, I just didn’t have any other choice.”</p><p>“Yes, you just became too interested,” Phil agrees easily, and they leave the library. The corridors are still empty, and Phil hesitates for a moment before heading to the right. “It’s not far away.”</p><p>“How are we going to check if it’s really the Mirror?” Dan asks. Phil stops in his tracks to send him an incredulous look.</p><p>“We’re going to look in it, of course. How often do you get a chance to see your deepest desires, huh?”</p><p>“And if it’s just a regular mirror?”</p><p>“Then you’ll see your reflection and understand that something needs to be done about this haircut,” Phil giggles.</p><p>“Hey! We have the same hair!” Dan protests and gets ready to count the ways in which his hair is actually better than Phil’s, but Phil stops near one of the classes, looks around cautiously, and pushes the handle.</p><p>The classroom looks like no one has used it in a while. Desks are pushed against the walls and haphazardly covered with something, windows are hidden behind dark curtains, and their steps are bouncing off of the naked walls. There’s a mirror in the centre of the room that looks exactly like Phil described it: old, a little dirty, with spider webs hanging from the corners of its grand frame. Phil looks at Dan triumphantly, and Dan reluctantly has to agree that yes, it really looks like the Mirror of Erised.</p><p>“Well, who’s first?” Phil asks in a whisper.</p><p>“You go,” Dan whispers back. Talking in a normal voice seems inappropriate for some reason.</p><p>“Scared?”</p><p>“Are you?”</p><p>After a few minutes of hushed arguing, Dan wins the rock-paper-scissors and Phil has to stand in front of the mirror. Dan takes a few steps back to leave Phil alone with his reflection, and for the first couple of seconds, nothing happens. Phil looks in the mirror, seemingly afraid to blink, and then suddenly jerks, the fear in his eyes turning to amazement.</p><p>“Holy cow!” he breathes out.</p><p>“What is it? What do you see?” Dan asks impatiently, his scepticism long forgotten.</p><p>“I see myself, only a bit older… No, actually, a lot older,” Phil describes not turning away from the mirror. “I’m an adult and I look very important, and I have a cloak and glasses, and… I think I’m working for the Ministry!”</p><p>“For the <em>Ministry</em>?” Dan repeats, not believing his ears. Phil continues as if he didn’t even hear him.</p><p>“And I have some kind of badge on my cloak…” Phil squints, trying to make it out, and gasps, “Dan, I’m the Head of Auror office!” Before Dan manages to say anything, he points his finger at the mirror. “And my parents are behind me! And Martyn is there as well, and everyone looks so pleased and they are smiling at me, and Martyn’s giving me a thumbs-up, and everyone is so happy…” Phil tears his eyes away from the mirror and looks at Dan with eyes full of hope. “Are you sure this mirror doesn’t predict the future?”</p><p>“I don’t think it does,” Dan slowly shakes his head. “For how long did you want to be an Auror?”</p><p>“I didn’t even know I wanted to,” Phil casts another look in the mirror and then shakes his head, taking a step to the side. “Come on, your turn.”</p><p>Dan admits to himself that until the very last moment he was sure that the mirror was fake, but what Phil said leaves very little room for doubts and when he stands in front of the mirror, they disappear altogether. Phil is just a step away from him, but he’s the only one showing in the mirror.</p><p>Soon he sees shadowy figures that slowly become his parents and his brother, but they are somewhat different from people that Dan knows in real life. There’s no worried frown on his mum’s face that’s always there when he’s talking about Hogwarts; she’s smiling when she sees him in his black school robes instead. His dad doesn’t look uneasy when he notices a bag full of magic books at his feet, but also smiles and claps him on the shoulder. Adrian is the last to run up to him as if he’s no longer afraid that Dan will poke his eye out with his wand, and tugs on his sleeve with a curious expression on his face, like he’s waiting for Dan to tell him some unbelievable story. There’s something new in his family’s eyes that Dan can't quite put his finger on, but it’s so important and it’s the main difference between this family and the one that’s waiting for him back home.</p><p>Pride.</p><p>“What do you have?” Phil asks cautiously. Dan swallows around a lump in his throat.</p><p>“I’m the greatest wizard of all time,” he croaks and clears his throat. “Greater than Merlin and Dumbledore and all of them. I can do whatever I want.”</p><p>“Sounds cool.” Phil smiles a little. Dan likes to think that Phil didn’t understand that he lied.</p><p>“Yeah.” He takes a deep breath. “Well, it’s really the Mirror of Erised, you won. Can we go now?”</p><p>Phil nods and silently heads to the door. Dan follows him, not looking at the Mirror, and hopes that Phil can’t see him wiping his eyes with his sleeve.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Alternative Chapter Title: Dan Howell and Mirror Mirror On The Wall Who's Gonna Have The Most UST Of Them All</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Year Three</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The second of September greets Dan with heavy grey clouds on the enchanted ceiling of the Great Hall and the steadily approaching classes, an unnecessary reminder that the summer was over. He drops on the bench next to Chris who’s gloomily looking somewhere between his oatmeal and a piece of parchment filled with colourful ink.</p>
<p>“The timetable,” he tells Dan and gives him another piece of parchment that looks slightly different. “Double History of Magic, Transfiguration, and Numerology. Remind me, why haven’t I left to live as a hermit yet?”</p>
<p>”No one forced you to take Numerology,” Dan points out, reaching out for the strawberry jam.</p>
<p>“Yes, but I was forced to take everything else.” Chris looks at the parchment as if it’s personally offended him. “And even Numerology looked alright only until I looked in the textbook and realised that we’re going to try and predict the future using numbers. I have only one question and that question is <em>why</em>?”</p>
<p>Dan just shrugs, knowing that Chris just needs to let out the annoyance that’s bubbling inside him at the start of every academic year and doesn’t want to actually hear any answers to his questions. Dan himself still sees Numerology as something vaguely entertaining, even though the diagrams that he briefly saw in <em>New Theory of Numerology</em> filled him with a slight feeling of dread. Last year, when he and Phil were choosing the subjects to take in their third year, Numerology simply seemed like the only thing worth taking.</p>
<p>“Ancient Runes? No one can convince me I’ll ever use them outside of school,” Dan reads aloud then, counting on his fingers. “Muggle Studies? I’m pretty sure I can already teach that. Divination? They can’t be serious. Care of Magical Creatures? You’ll have to do that one without me. So you see, that leaves only Numerology.”</p>
<p>Phil looks at him disapprovingly, biting at his quill. “You still have to choose at least two subjects, Dan.”</p>
<p>“I know, I know. What do you have?” Dan looks over Phil’s shoulder, who seems to have it a little easier. “Muggle Studies? Are you serious?”</p>
<p>“Not all of us had the privilege of being born in the Muggle world to automatically know everything about it,” Phil crosses his arms defensively. “I want to know.”</p>
<p>“What exactly? How do hoovers work? Ask me, I’ll tell you everything.”</p>
<p>“I hope we’ll get to something more interesting,” Phil waves his hand dismissively. “Maybe, of course, I’ll have a chance to hold a giant hoover between my hands.”</p>
<p>Dan stares at him, but Phil just returns to his pieces of parchment on the table, not even realising that he said something weird.</p>
<p>“Alright,” Dan sighs. “What else?”</p>
<p>“I’m thinking Care of Magical Creatures. Maybe you’ll take this one too?” Phil looks at him with hope in his eyes. “I’ve heard that for the first six months we won’t see anything else apart from the Flobberworms, so there’s nothing to be scared of.”</p>
<p>Dan feels cold sweat on the back of his neck. Phil’s his best friend, but he can’t understand that fear yet.</p>
<p>“I’m not a fan of things that crawl in their own slime, thank you,” he fakes a smile and looks at the list of subjects for the hundredth time, hoping that Phil won’t push. That leaves him with only Divination and Ancient Runes.</p>
<p>“I’ll take Divination if you take Divination,” Phil sends him a sly smile. Dan looks at him in surprise.</p>
<p>“What’s the point in taking Divination?”</p>
<p>“What’s the point in <em>not</em> taking Divination,” Phil corrects him. “It’s the easiest subject. There’s no science behind it, just come up with a meaning for your dreams a couple of times a week, and that’s it.”</p>
<p>“I think Chris is a bad influence in your life,” Dan mutters, still feeling like it’s a solid argument. Phil’s ears turn pink.</p>
<p>“I’m just trying to make your life easier. So what do you say?”</p>
<p>“Fine,” Dan gives up and writes down Divination next to Numerology. Phil grins, very pleased with himself, and does the same. “Wait, so I have only two new subjects and you have three? So you can go around telling everyone that you’re smarter than me?”</p>
<p>“Yes, Dan, you saw right through my plans,” Phil rolls his eyes, but Dan, feeling competitive all of a sudden, feverishly searches around for his quill.</p>
<p>“Now I have three subjects too, ha!” he announces and victoriously points his quill at Phil. Phil looks at his parchment that has a new and proud addition of ‘Ancient Runes’ and snorts.</p>
<p>“Just don’t blame me if you fail your exams.”</p>
<p>“I solemnly swear to do just that,” Dan promises and ducks away from an empty inkwell.</p>
<p>Now, with Chris looking like he contemplates drowning in his own oatmeal, Dan can’t help but question his choices. They have the same classes today but tomorrow he has Divination first thing in the morning.</p>
<p>Double History of Magic goes just about the same as usual, and most of the class is out dead five minutes in, leaving Dan to try and fail to take notes with Professor Binns’s voice steadily droning on in the background. Chris next to him mutters something about herbivorous crocodiles and flying saucepans in his sleep, and Dan has to stifle his giggles and cross out lines about Chris’s ridiculous dreams, appearing on his parchment instead of anything on the witch hunt. Transfiguration, on the other hand, can’t be more different from History of Magic and leaves Dan sure of his irreversible stupidity as they try to turn cups into hamsters. He would’ve laughed at Tom, a guy from Gryffindor with a sharp word always at the end of his tongue, whose cup screams and jumps off the table as soon as he gets his wand out, but his own cup refuses to cooperate at all and at the end of the lesson just makes a sorry noise and falls apart.</p>
<p>Dan’s mood gets better after lunch because on their way to Numerology they meet PJ, who tells them in secret that during the first lesson of Care of Magical Creatures he got bitten by a Flobberworm and proudly shows them his index finger with the world’s smallest band-aid on it. Chris can’t stop laughing, causing Professor Vector to ask if he needs to go to the hospital wing, and Dan can’t wait for the end of the lesson; if PJ got off on the wrong foot with the worms, Phil must be covered in bandages from head to toe.</p>
<p>(Phil is sitting in the Great Hall with a bruise blooming on his knee and doesn’t even turn red while saying that he tripped over his own feet as soon as Hagrid got the buckets full of worms out of his hut. The decision that Phil’s fail is more embarrassing than PJ’s, because he was so excited to see the flobberworms that he couldn’t even stand straight, is unanimous.)</p>
<p>Next morning Phil continues to talk about Flobberworms with such adoration that Dan starts seriously considering rethinking his life choices and finding a new, <em>sane</em> group of friends. He doesn’t fully commit to that only because they reach Professor Trelawney's classroom in the North Tower and Phil falls silent, looking at their surroundings in confusion.</p>
<p>The classroom doesn’t look like any others that they’ve been in before. There’s a fire burning in the fireplace, even though the weather is still warm, and the dark red curtains are closed shut, leaving the room in a mysterious twilight. Round tables stand so close to each other that it’s almost impossible to walk past them, and the first thing Phil does is trip over a pouffe.</p>
<p>“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” he whispers to Dan after regaining balance.</p>
<p>Dan shrugs and sneezes, awkwardly covering his face with his sleeve; the sweet smell of spices in the air is tickling his nose. He notices white cloudy crystal balls in one of the cabinets and waves his hand in that direction.</p>
<p>“As right as it can be.”</p>
<p>Gradually the classroom fills with other students, who are also taken aback by the interior design of the place and scrunch their noses from the overwhelming smell of spices. Felix falls on the pouffe next to Dan, looking like he was dragged here by force, and seeing Marzia, who stares at her surroundings in awe, Dan thinks that this is exactly what happened. Marzia’s love for all things otherworldly and mysterious is no secret to anyone in Hogwarts; Felix sits next to Dan in Potions and complains that for a Ravenclaw Marzia believes in too much nonsense, but Dan suspects that half the time Felix enjoys that nonsense even more than Marzia does. When angry Filch was escorting Marzia off of the Astronomy Tower where she was trying to see Saturn without a telescope, Felix was standing next to her and telling anyone who was willing to listen that stars these days have the most ridiculous names. When Marzia found a ball of fur near the Forbidden Forest, she and Felix nearly convinced Professor Flitwick that it was a sign of an alien invasion, and after Marzia failed to brew the Draught of Living Death and didn’t have eyebrows for a while, Felix tried to fight everyone who as much as mentioned it, even though both his hands were seriously burned. So Dan doesn’t really buy the sorrowful sighs with which Felix gets his copy of <em>Unfogging the Future</em> out of his bag, while Marzia is already hurriedly writing something about crystal balls on a piece of parchment.</p>
<p>Dan notices Professor Trelawney even before she starts speaking: she emerges from behind the curtains and stretches her arms in greeting as if trying to hug the whole room at once. She’s wearing giant glasses and at least a few shawls, her arms are covered in bracelets, and the rings on her fingers are sparkling even in the dimly lit room; she seems a perfect match for her gloomily red classroom. When she starts talking about the syllabus and her Third Eye, her voice solemn and tragic, Dan looks around and sees that most students, including Felix, are doing everything not to burst out laughing. Phil and a few other people are trying their best to fake interest, nodding at the end of every sentence to pretend that they’re actually listening, and only Marzia is looking at Professor Trelawney with awe in her eyes, ready to start predicting death for everyone who as much as looks her way.</p>
<p>The rest of the lesson is as much of a mess. They pair up and try to predict each other’s future using tea leaves. Marzia, alternating between staring at his cup and flipping through the pages of <em>Unfogging the Future</em>, tells Dan about years of unhappiness that await him before he gets under the golden shower of luck, while Dan unsuccessfully tries to see something other than brown goo in her cup. At the table next to them, Felix uses his scariest voice to describe a dark-haired girl in a white sheet that’ll come to get Phil in exactly seven days, and Phil himself giggles and claims to see nothing but dogs in his tea leaves. This attracts Professor Trelawney’s attention, and after one look she immediately says that Felix has a Grim in his cup. Felix just says, “Well, we’re all going to die someday” with such nonchalance that Dan collapses on his table laughing, unable to look at Professor Trelawney’s shocked face.</p>
<p>“We should’ve taken Divination from Firenze,” Felix sums up as they leave the North Tower. “Maybe he actually has some of that centaur wisdom, unlike this weirdo.”</p>
<p>“Felix!” Marzia jabs him with her finger. “Give her a chance. She looks very passionate about what she’s doing, so it can’t be a bad thing. I really doubt that you had a Grim in your cup, though,” she adds thoughtfully. “Dogs usually mean something good…”</p>
<p>Marzia talks about the vague art of reading tea leaves until she disappears in the Charms classroom. Felix taps his temple with his finger as soon as she can’t see him and heads to Transfiguration.</p>
<p>“I’ll see you at Herbology?” Dan looks at his watch.</p>
<p>“If you live that long,” Phil winks, which gets him a crumpled piece parchment in the face and an <em>oh my god</em> from Dan, and leaves for History of Magic.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Warm sunny days are quickly replaced with chilly rainy ones, and November is filled with Phil whining about Winston hating the cold, which goes against his love for exploring the castle.</p>
<p>“He ran away again,” he sulks during Herbology one particularly cloudy morning. Dan hums something through his protective mask and nods to show that he’s listening. “Just yesterday he was happily sitting near the fireplace, and I woke up to him disappeared without a trace. Does he hate Hogwarts that much?”</p>
<p>“Your toad just has the crappiest self-preservation instinct,” Chris says distractedly as he wipes sweat off his forehead and gives his venomous tentacula a suspicious glance. “Don’t worry, as soon as the night falls he’ll come crawling back, missing the warmth of your lair… ouch! That’s it, you overgrown thistle, I’m done messing around!”</p>
<p>Phil doesn’t look like that made him feel much better, so, having made sure that Professor Sprout is occupied with other students and Chris is too busy yelling like a samurai and snapping at his tentacula with hedge clippers, Dan lightly pokes him in the side.</p>
<p>“Hey. He’s always come back, which means he likes it here. Chris is right, it’s not the end of the world.”</p>
<p>“Well, if I can’t even take care of a toad…” Phil starts, but his sentence is cut short by the appearance of Professor Sprout that tells them to show her how they’re dealing with the venomous tentacula. Phil’s expression immediately becomes serious, and Dan is left to wonder at such a sudden change.</p>
<p>If he learned anything about Phil in the last three years, it’s that he’s much better with plants than with animals. During their first year, Phil used a simple fire spell to save Dean Dobbs from his House from an unfortunate encounter with the Devil’s Snare and lost Winston for the very first time in the same evening. On the verge of a breakdown, he recruited every single student he could find to help him search the castle only for them to return to their tower and see Winston sleeping on the armchair next to the fireplace. Last year Phil was the only person in their year who was never attacked by leaping toadstools, even though he worked with them as much as everyone else did, and a week later he stroked someone’s cat and spent three days in the hospital wing because he couldn’t stop sneezing. And right now Phil, still in the middle of sulking about Winston, clips the top off of the tentacula in one swift motion, causing it to freeze in confusion, and covers it with a glass cap.</p>
<p>“Well done, Lester,” Professor Sprout says approvingly. “You, Howell, need to watch and learn.”</p>
<p>Dan guiltily nods his head. When she goes over to the next pair, consisting of Chris that’s still yelling profanities and Dodie that’s openly laughing at him, Phil is back to looking beaten down.</p>
<p>“Why did you even take Care of Magical Creatures?” Dan asks as they approach another wildly shaking tentacula. Phil looks at him with an unreadable expression on his face, so he rushes to add, “It’s just, you’re so much better with plants. But I’m not saying you made the wrong choice and I’m not judging you, I’m just curious and I’m not going to start thinking differently of you because of your answer, and also… Okay, I’ll shut up.”</p>
<p>Phil rolls his eyes at this incoherent speech.</p>
<p>“I just like animals,” he says simply. “They are just like us, they’re smart, they care for each other, they have habits that we can’t understand yet. And they want to be friends with us, unlike those guys,” he gestures at the tentacula with his clippers. It still looks vaguely threatening. “And how can we deny them that friendship?” Phil’s ears pinken a little. “Here. This can be the most boring explanation ever, I don’t care.”</p>
<p>Dan thinks it’s <em>adorable</em>.</p>
<p>“Nothing boring about that,” he mutters instead and goes to deal with his tentacula.</p>
<p>After they’re done with Herbology, they still have a few minutes before their next lessons (Charms for Dan, and Chris has already sprinted inside the castle to have some secret meeting with PJ that he described as ‘giving me the strength I need to endure another forty-five minutes of torture’) and Phil catches Dan’s sleeve as they leave the greenhouses.</p>
<p>“Since we’re talking about that,” he starts as they walk towards the castle, “this is something I wanted to ask for a while. What do you have against animals? From what I’ve seen, you don’t have problems only with your owl.”</p>
<p>Phil looks way too determined and Dan feels that he won’t be able to walk away from the answer.</p>
<p>“Can I just give you some speech about all of them being vicious carnivores out for our blood?” he still asks just in case.</p>
<p>“Only if you really feel that way,” Phil shrugs. “And if you really don’t want to talk about it, let’s just forget it, and…”</p>
<p>“Do you know who pulls the Hogwarts carriages?” Dan interrupts him. He feels that if he’s not going to start talking now, he’ll chicken out and run away. Phil looks taken aback by that question.</p>
<p>“No one pulls the carriages, Dan. That’s why they’re called horseless carriages.”</p>
<p>“Sometimes I think I’m the only person in our year that actually finished reading <em>Hogwarts: A History</em>,” Dan rolls his eyes. “It’s the Thestrals, Phil, Thestrals pull the carriages.”</p>
<p>“Thestrals?” Phil repeats, baffled. “Then why haven’t I seen… oh.” Dan sees the moment when Phil remembers what he knows about Thestrals, and his expression gets stained with fear. “Oh no.”</p>
<p>“Oh yes,” Dan nods darkly. He still somehow manages to tune this conversation out and he wants to finish it that way, pretending that he’s talking about someone other than himself. “I was seven. My mum and I were taking the tube. There were a lot of people, everyone was shoving and yelling at each other, and some guy just stood too close to the edge when the train arrived.”</p>
<p>Despite it happening so long ago, Dan still sees the scene way too clear for his own liking. The train driver is trying to stop the train, the brakes make a horrible screeching noise, but it’s already too late. People around him are screaming, the crowd is getting tighter, and his mum is holding him close, making him turn away, but Dan still sees everything - the terror in the man’s eyes as he loses his balance, his hands helplessly grabbing for support, and the fastly approaching train. Years later, having arrived at Hogwarts, Dan realises that he’ll be able to see Thestrals as soon as he understands who they are, and he dreads the third year when they are supposed to get to the castle in carriages. The Thestrals, looking like skeletons of giant horses, stare at him with their big glowing eyes, moving around with their leathery wings and long black tails, and that is enough for Dan to never want to deal with any magical creature ever again. He prefers dogs, thank you very much.</p>
<p>“So no magical creatures for me,” he forces a smile as Phil still looks at him, hands covering his mouth. “I draw my line at the flying half-horses that symbolise death, and I don’t even want to imagine what other beasts the world has in store.”</p>
<p>The bell rings and Dan, who’s never been happier about a class starting, waves at Phil and runs to Charms. As he looks back, he sees Phil join a group of hurried Hufflepuffs, looking lost in thought, and thinks that Phil won’t drop the subject so easily.</p>
<p>And he’s right: as he leaves the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom where they just spent half an hour writing down how to deal with the Red Caps, Phil’s already waiting for him. Chris disappears immediately, saying something like <em>I’ll leave you two birdies to it</em>, and Dan can’t even react to that untimely betrayal because Phil grabs his wrist and starts dragging him somewhere.</p>
<p>“Hey, what’s that about?” Realising that Phil, apparently, has a grip of steel and escape is not an option, Dan tries talking. “Phil, wait! I swear on everything I hold dear that I’m not going to run away but you need to stop, you restless creature! PHIL!”</p>
<p>Phil finally listens to the voice of reason and stops, releasing his wrist.</p>
<p>“What’s going on?” Dan asks, trying to catch his breath. They’re already on the second floor and the speed at which they were running down the stairs is simply unacceptable. He really needs to sign up for Quidditch next year.</p>
<p>“I want to show you something.” Dan’s not sure what’s written on his face, but it has to show some degree of distrust because Phil lifts his hands defensively. “Nothing bad, nothing dangerous, nothing weird, I promise.”</p>
<p>That doesn’t do much to convince Dan, because Phil tends to have a different definition of ‘weird’ from most people.</p>
<p>“And it can’t wait at all?” he asks suspiciously. Phil shakes his head. “And you can’t just tell me what it is?”</p>
<p>“I’m not going to murder you in the depths of the Forbidden Forest, Dan, and sell your organs to the centaurs,” Phil rolls his eyes. “I promise you, it’s nothing bad, really. Can you trust me?”</p>
<p>“I’d have way more trust without that organ-selling premise,” Dan mutters but still nods. Phil smiles, relieved, and they continue walking.</p>
<p>When they leave the castle to head towards the Forbidden Forest, Dan starts having doubts again. Phil still keeps looking at him as if to check that he stays true to his word and is not attempting to run away, and only that, and not curiosity at all, is what’s keeping Dan from legging it to the Slytherin common room. They come to the Hagrid’s hut, and as soon as Dan sees <em>that</em> he stops in his tracks.</p>
<p>“No,” he says loudly. “No. Nope. Never. You’re a great manipulator, Phil Lester, but you’re not convincing me to do this.”</p>
<p>There’s a big grey hippogriff lying next to the hut, eyeing them with great interest.</p>
<p>“But they are so harmless,” Phil says helplessly.</p>
<p>“With those beaks and those claws? I think you should see why I’m having trouble believing that.” Dan takes a step back. Standing at what he deems a safe distance, he questions, “Why did you think this was a good idea?”</p>
<p>“Because I wanted to show you, Dan, that not every animal in the magical world stands for doom and gloom!” Phil exclaims, nearly smacking himself in the face with his own hand. “Hippogriffs are so wonderful, they are very loyal and friendly if you behave around them in a right way, they can transport people from one place to another, and they are not that hard to tame. I just don’t want you to judge the whole world of amazing creatures based on Thestrals that have so many stupid myths surrounding them,” he adds quietly. “Tell you what, if you don’t like the hippogriff, I’ll back off and never bother you again with this. Just try it once, Dan, you’re never going to know unless you try.”</p>
<p>Dan looks from Phil’s hopeful face to the hippogriff that still lies unmoving, blinking at him with his big orange eyes. He does look quite peaceful, lying like that, and if he doesn’t get up and start running or flapping his wings, maybe their meeting can have a happy ending, after all. Dan’s not doing it just because it’s so important to Phil, no, he’s not.</p>
<p>“What do I have to do?” he sighs, signalling his defeat. Phil’s smile is so bright that he almost has to shield his eyes.</p>
<p>“It’s very easy,” Phil starts explaining immediately, “and I’m going to be standing right here so nothing ever will go wrong. You need to come up to him… no, a bit closer,” he corrects, when Dan takes a few unsure steps forward. “Like that. Now look him in the eyes - don’t blink, that’s very important - and bow.”</p>
<p>Dan takes a few more steps and focuses on the hippogriff that’s looking at him thoughtfully. Fighting an overwhelming urge to blink, Dan slowly bows, afraid to move a muscle. He suddenly realises how much he really trusts Phil; he’s basically offering that hippogriff to take a bite out of his neck just because Phil said it’s absolutely safe.</p>
<p>After a few excruciatingly long seconds the hippogriff bows back, lowering his head.</p>
<p>“Great!” Phil jumps up in excitement. “You can come closer now, but slowly.”</p>
<p>Dan carefully approaches the hippogriff, who’s back to looking at him with interest, and stops a few feet away from him, not sure what to do next. Suddenly the hippogriff shifts his weight from one leg to the other, and Dan almost jumps out of his skin.</p>
<p>“He’s making himself comfortable, which means that he doesn’t see you as a threat,” Phil rushes to explain and Dan calms down a little, even though his heart is still hammering in his chest. “You can pet him if you want, he’s okay with that.”</p>
<p>Dan really doesn’t want to be touching any part of that animal but still raises his hand and strokes the hippogriff’s beak with shaky fingers. The hippogriff closes his eyes in pleasure and Dan repeats the movement, feeling braver and braver.</p>
<p>“So, what do you think?” Phil asks, noticing that Dan’s finally gotten comfortable enough to speak.</p>
<p>“He’s very…” Dan tries to think of a word that would describe both the hippogriff and what he’s feeling right now. “Interesting.”</p>
<p>A smile appears on Phil’s face again. “What did I tell you! They are so smart, and if you respect them, they will respect you. Not everything in this world wants to immediately rip you to shreds.”</p>
<p>“I never said that,” Dan protests weakly because the last thing he wants to do right now is argue. “But these hippogriffs do seem like cool guys.”</p>
<p>“I could never ask for a better compliment,” Phil rolls his eyes, still looking very pleased. “Come on, if you keep petting him we’re going to be late for dinner.”</p>
<p>Dan bows to the hippogriff once again, receiving a solemn bow in return, and they head back to the castle, already illuminated in lights. Near the entrance to the Great Hall, in the middle of the loud crowd of students, Dan tugs at Phil’s sleeve and stares at the wall when Phil turns around, feeling awkward all of a sudden.</p>
<p>“Thanks.”</p>
<p>Phil’s smile is a mix of <em>I told you so</em> and <em>you’re welcome</em>, and Dan almost doesn’t take offence at all.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Alternative Chapter Title: Dan Howell and Even The Hippogriff Ships It Now</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Year Four</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Dan spends the very first day of his fourth year in Hogwarts in the library, waving away Chris’s wailing about O.W.L.s waiting for them only at the end of their fifth year and there being no point preparing for them now because they’ll forget everything anyway. To Phil pointing out that it’s impossible to forget<em> everything</em>, Chris responds by rolling his eyes, as if saying <em>it’s possible for me</em>, and keeps drearily staring at his copy of <em>Important Modern Magical Discoveries</em>. Dan doesn’t get Phil’s sudden desire to be a good student either, so he leaves him and PJ to argue in angry whispers about what the O.W.L. in Herbology is going to look like and wanders into the Transfiguration section and looks at the books on the Animagi.</p>
<p>The desire to learn how to change his appearance from human to animal sticks with Dan from last year, when Professor McGonagall gives them a scarily large essay about Animagi that are officially registered with the Ministry of Magic. While going through the pile of books and cursing each and every single one of those people, Dan finds out that there are only seven of law-abiding Animagi while everyone else exists only in rumours, and the Ministry keeps trying and failing to track them down and make them register, creating an even more mystical air around them. Letting his curiosity get the best of him, Dan spends a few nights reading about all sorts of people, from those leading ordinary lives and resorting to their animal counterparts only when absolutely necessary to criminals turning to animals to avoid justice and never returning to their human form. The essay gets him an A and asks him to <em>refrain from singing praises to criminals, Howell</em> and he throws it to the back of his trunk and decides to become an Animagus.</p>
<p>Actually, if Dan is completely honest with himself, which he doesn’t like to be for a number of reasons, there’s another thing that fuels his interest in the Animagi. Dan tries really hard not to think about it too much, but the scene of him meeting that hippogriff last year is still fresh in his mind. He’d be happy to say that it opened his eyes to the true beauty of the magical creatures and taught him to love and accept them, but him mum always tells him not to lie to himself, so he doesn’t say that. He still tries to stay away from students that bring pets that could be considered more dangerous than a toad and thinks that his concerns are perfectly valid. Joe Sugg, a Slytherin a year below him, returns from the Christmas break once with a very exotic and a very dangerous tarantula that’s very opposed to staying inside his box and breaks free, spending two days terrorising the entire school before being caught and urgently transported back to his homeland, and this just justifies Dan’s belief that the safest place to observe magical creatures is still from the top of the Astronomy Tower. Even the hippogriff, who turned out to be a surprisingly calm and friendly creature, still fills Dan with a slight feeling of dread any time he approaches him; who knows when the hippogriff decides he’s had enough and breaks Dan’s spine with his freakishly strong legs.</p>
<p>Phil, on the other hand, just keeps laughing at his fears and is the first one to run towards that tarantula to greet it, even though it bares its fangs and hisses at him. He’s also happily waving at Dan with the salad leaves, getting ready to feed the Flobberworms, and brings dead rats and mice to the hippogriff but refuses to tell Dan where he gets them from. Dan rubs his face and shakes his head, looking at <em>Transformation Through the Ages</em> without too much interest. Phil’s endless enthusiasm for everything even remotely related to animals is that other thing driving him to become an Animagus, and it’s also one of the main reasons why he prefers not to be honest with himself.</p>
<p>After about ten minutes of wandering through the shelves, Dan starts to feel the suspicious glare of Madam Pince on the back of his head and decides to go with a book with the least amount of theory and the most amount of pictures that he can read in the relative safety of the Slytherin common room. He doesn’t need questioning on why he spends so much time in the library on the first day of the term, and sometimes Madam Pince knows way too much about their syllabi and lists of recommended literature.</p>
<p>When Dan leaves the library, the book well-hidden in his bag, he realises that his plans to spend a quiet evening reading on Animagi in a comfy chair near the fireplace will not come to be. Not today, at least, because Chris is already waiting for him in the corridor.</p>
<p>“Earth to nerds! How’s the reception down there?” Chris pokes the copy of <em>Men Who Love Dragons Too Much</em> that Dan checked out for a bit of <em>light reading</em> before the semester starts. Dan gives him an unimpressed look but Chris is too busy listening to himself talk to notice anything else. “Are you done with hanging out with old boring dudes that live in the old boring books and are you ready to come back to the cool kids?” Dan doesn’t even get to point out that, firstly, books aren’t old and boring (well, not <em>all</em> of them) and, secondly, <em>the cool kids</em>? Chris grabs him by the hand and drags him to a dark corner, where he tells him in his best secretive whisper, “Tonight we’re celebrating the beginning of the new academic year in the Room of Requirement. If you don’t come, then consider our built on centuries of trials and tribulations friendship over.”</p>
<p>“I’ve literally known you for only three…” Dan starts, rolling his eyes, but then decides to focus on the matter at hand. “Wait, celebrating?”</p>
<p>“Well, yeah,” Chris is smirking in a way that’s promising trouble. “How can we reminisce on our school years without having random gaps in our memory created by our good friend alcohol? Eight o’clock, Barnabas the Barmy, eighth floor, you know the drill. Bring a friend if you want.”</p>
<p>Chris winks at him and heads in the opposite direction from the Slytherin common room.</p>
<p>“We have the same friends, you spork!” Dan shouts after him. Chris flips him off without looking, and Dan says goodbye to <em>Great Wizards of the Twentieth Century</em> with a sigh. </p>
<p>***</p>
<p>“You know, any normal person would be happy that the first of September fell on a Friday,” Phil notes as they go up the endless marble stairs to the eighth floor.</p>
<p>“But we’re not normal?” Dan finishes for him, wheezing. “Jesus, what kind of health-obsessed freak built this castle? Next year I’m signing up for Quidditch for sure.”</p>
<p>“Of course,” Phil nods, amusement apparent in his voice, but Dan’s too busy trying not to die in the middle of the stairs to say something about that. “And we’re not normal, yes,” he returns to his original thought. “Any ideas why?”</p>
<p>“A couple,” Dan responds. “For example, the fact that I decided to sit next to that idiot over there,” he waves his hand in the vague direction of where Chris is waiting for them, “on my very first day in this school from Hell.”</p>
<p>Phil shakes his head disapprovingly when he hears about ‘school from Hell’.</p>
<p>“Just a few more flights left,” he says encouragingly, and a sly sparkle appears in his eyes. “Race you?”</p>
<p>“Yeah, and then you’re going to carry me to the hospital wing,” Dan snorts but Phil’s already sprinting forward, yelling something about the brave conquerors of marble, and there’s nothing left for Dan to do but curse and run after him.</p>
<p>Chris, PJ, and Felix are already standing next to the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy. Once he’s done wanting to spit out his own lungs and kick Phil, who’s also wheezing but still finds some breath to giggle victoriously, Dan takes a moment to wonder why this particular group hasn’t aroused any suspicion yet. Felix is holding a few weirdly shaped paper bags with a strange smile on his face. PJ, wearing a look of determination Dan’s never seen before, knocks on the wall as if trying to find a hidden treasure. Finally, Chris is attempting to perform a complicated ballet move, looking back at the trolls on the tapestry for guidance.</p>
<p>To be fair, Dan first stumbles upon the Room of Requirement thanks to Chris, or, more accurately, thanks to Chris having no self-preservation instinct. During their second year Chris comes up with a game with a very complicated name that boils down to being as far away from the common room as possible after hours and not getting caught by Filch, and somehow he manages to convince them to participate in it for almost four months. On one of those nights, Dan and Phil find themselves on the eighth floor trying to run away from Mrs Norris that’s been on their backs since the fifth floor; after frantically running around the troll tapestry for a few minutes Dan notices a door in the wall and drags Phil, who already started reading him his last will and testament, after him. The room turns out to be no bigger than a broom closet and they stand in there for twenty minutes, afraid to breathe, while Filch is trying to question Barnabas the Barmy, and swear to each other never to participate in any of Chris’s shenanigans ever again.</p>
<p>(In the morning they find out that Chris was singing dirty limericks from the very top of the Astronomy Tower while PJ was trying to transfigure a helmet from one of the knights into a camera for photographic evidence and failing because he was laughing so much. Filch, who came to investigate the commotion, gave detention to all three of them, including the helmet which somehow became sentient, making them work in the hospital wing for two weeks. Dan comes to ask Madam Pomfrey for a headache potion the next day, sees Chris trying to teach the helmet to sing one of the limericks while PJ is scrubbing the floor next to him, and decides that it was a good idea never to do anything with Chris again.)</p>
<p>“I don’t want to know why you’re all breathless and happy,” Chris dramatically covers his eyes, still trying to hold a dance pose.</p>
<p>“I don’t need to tell you anything, Baryshnikov.” Dan finally manages to get his breath back and immediately kicks Phil.</p>
<p>“If you can’t say anything, it’s no reason to swear,” Chris scolds him and, having made sure that his pose looks just like the third troll on the left, stands back on both feet. “So, my children,” he claps his hands, ignoring <em>I’m eight months older than you</em> from Phil, “it’s time to dive deep into the world of forbidden temptations and desires which awaits us behind this door…”</p>
<p>“There’s no door,” PJ reasonably points out.</p>
<p>“<em>Behind this door</em>,” Chris repeats loudly, causing Barnabas to cast him a confused look from his tapestry. “A world of heavenly pleasures and magical adventures, unseen and unheard of before, and we’ll travel the universe describing them, and for the first few decades not a living soul will believe us, because, in their foolish opinion, no Earthman is capable of feeling such cosmic pleasure, but we’ll keep talking about it until our tongues dry out and our eyes fall out, until…”</p>
<p>“Anyway,” Felix interrupts him, noticing that Chris’s speech is headed in a weird direction. “A little party never killed nobody.”</p>
<p>“You didn’t need to look at me like it’s going to kill me,” Phil mutters and, to illustrate his point, immediately trips over his own feet. Felix waves him off and starts walking in front of the tapestry, his lips moving silently. In a few moments, a wooden door appears in the wall and he cautiously looks around before gesturing for everyone to follow him.</p>
<p>During his first time in the Room of Requirement Dan was too afraid of Filch bursting in at any moment to properly pay attention to his surroundings, but something tells him that the Room looks entirely different right now. Enchanted candles are floating in the air, showing a room approximately the size of a common room, the fireplace is pleasantly warm, and there’s plenty of colourful bean bags on the floor. As soon as he sees them, Chris runs towards the bright pink one.</p>
<p>“I call dibs! This is the manliest colour!”</p>
<p>“Only after you win it in the manliest battle!” Felix makes a battle cry and runs after Chris, leaving his weirdly shaped paper bags at the door. The next few minutes are filled with hooting and shouting ‘and how would you like it if <em>I</em> tickled <em>your</em> knee pit?’, so Dan takes a moment to peek inside the bags. Predictably, one of them contains biscuits and cakes from the kitchen, which makes Phil extremely happy, and Dan takes out a surprisingly heavy bottle of something amber-coloured from the second one.</p>
<p>“Firewhisky?” he asks in disbelief.</p>
<p>“Yup,” Felix confirms from the floor, abandoning his attempts to bite Chris’s ankle.</p>
<p>PJ looks over Dan’s shoulder with interest. “Where did you get that from?”</p>
<p>“A man needs to have his secrets.” Felix kicks Chris one more time for good measure before admitting defeat and blows a kiss to an empty frame above the fireplace. “The only thing you should care about is me providing the best booze for our manly company of bestest buds.”</p>
<p>“What, Marzia still refused to come?” Phil asks.</p>
<p>“Yeah,” Felix looks down for a second. “Said something about us being a bunch of drunken pigs and went to read about ancient runes.”</p>
<p>“You’re totally whipped,” Chris tells him, falling down to his bean bag, and gets kicked once again. “Hey, while you’re being all lovey-dovey over there I’m being abused!”</p>
<p>Chris looks ready to continue complaining about how unfair his life is for a little longer, but PJ shoves a chocolate biscuit in his mouth and he shuts up, even though Dan’s sure that it won’t last long.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Dan rarely thinks about his age, mostly because he’s still unsure of where he stands. His mum still treats him like a five-year-old, every winter sending him an owl with a reminder to wear a scarf outside, while the teachers, judging by the difficulty and the sheer volume of the homework, see him as a great magical scientist from his very first day in Hogwarts. Right now, however, a half-empty bottle of Firewhisky serves as a great reminder that he’s only fourteen: he doesn’t need more than a couple of glasses for his head to get pleasantly fuzzy and for his limbs to get heavy.</p>
<p>Felix has one sip of Firewhisky before declaring that he’s going to ‘kick that wall’s ass’ but quickly forgets about it because it turns out that the Room can materialise pretty much anything that he asks for. When Dan looks over at him in fifteen minutes, he’s sitting on a pile of white lawn chairs, wearing the flag of Sweden as a cape, and demanding that the Room makes him surstromming, mixing in threats in Swedish here and there. Chris, a polar opposite to Felix, is still lying down on his bright pink bean bag and starts wailing like a fire siren every time anyone comes too close to him. The only exception to this rule, surprising Dan more than it probably should, is PJ who’s allowed to be next to Chris because ‘his hair is soft like a velvet pillow and not prickly and poisonous like that hay that you all have’. PJ himself is sitting cross-legged on the floor, allowing Chris to stroke his hair, and doesn’t even try to ask how hay can be poisonous. Dan thinks that PJ’s fallen asleep, but from time to time he reaches out to grab a biscuit without even opening his eyes.</p>
<p>Dan kinda wants a biscuit as well, but his limbs stopped feeling like his own a while ago, so he just looks at Phil who’s telling a very exciting story, judging by how actively he gesticulates. His cheeks are flaming red and his eyes are bright with a frantic fire, betraying that he’s also had his two glasses of Firewhisky, and Dan needs a few seconds to understand what he’s talking about.</p>
<p>“We found the kitchen, right,” Phil babbles excitedly, counting on his fingers, “and the Room of Requirement, correct? You know what that means, right, what kind of room is left for us?”</p>
<p>“Your mum’s room?” Chris asks, his people skills only empowered by the amount of alcohol in his system. Phil pays no attention to him.</p>
<p>“The Chamber of Secrets!” he announces happily, jumping at his spot. “And we don’t even have to look for it, it’s already,” he stops for a second, thinking, “been <em>founded</em>, there we go! We just need to open it!”</p>
<p>“Don’t we need to speak the snake language for that, you dumb-dumb?” Chris even stops petting PJ for a moment to attempt hissing like a snake. He sounds more like a melting kettle, but he’s not too bothered by that.</p>
<p>“That’s what we need magic for!” Phil exclaims, not fazed in the slightest. “They were all so busy trying to open it with snakes, but we’re going to open it with magic! Think about that, they came up with all these complications and probably just forgot to try <em>Alohomora</em>, so if we go down there and…” Phil imitates flicking a wand. “We’ll be in the Chamber of Secrets!”</p>
<p>Chris looks so convinced that he even considers jumping up to his feet, but then looks at his fingers in PJ’s hair and hums thoughtfully.</p>
<p>“In the morning, mate,” he finally decides, his tone serious. “Currently I have important business to attend to.”</p>
<p>“But the Chamber of Secrets…”</p>
<p>Phil sounds so dejected that Dan makes a very brave attempt to open his mouth and declare that he’s ready to open at least three Chambers of Secrets, but his tongue refuses to cooperate and in the end, Chris beats him to it.</p>
<p>“At dawn, as soon as the first rooster crows, we’ll sneak out, quiet and graceful, like…”</p>
<p>“Even before dawn!” Phil interrupts, his eyes shining bright again, and Dan thinks that he can look at him until that very dawn, and it doesn’t matter that his arms and legs feel heavy with exhaustion and his tongue is pretty much useless. Phil keeps talking, making plans about wandering through the dark corridors, his gestures becoming wilder and wilder, and Dan suddenly feels that everything is right with the world.</p>
<p>A blue and yellow figure appears out of nowhere, hiding Phil from him, and just as Dan is getting ready to tell it to get lost, the figure kicks his bean bag.</p>
<p>“Sleep,” it says in Felix’s voice. Apparently, he stopped trying to create surstromming out of thin air and now pretty much collapses on the floor next to Dan. Dan gasps involuntarily, feeling the chair underneath him turn into a sleeping bag.</p>
<p>PJ drops down right where he was sitting, still not asking Chris any questions, even though he doesn’t look like he plans on letting him go.</p>
<p>“I have to warn you, I sleep kiss,” Chris tells him in a sing-song voice.</p>
<p>“And I sleep punch,” PJ mocks his tone and Chris snorts, offended.</p>
<p>Even right now, feeling like he doesn’t have a care in the world, Dan understands that they won’t be sleeping for long. However, it barely comes as a consolation when the Room wakes them up at six in the morning with a rooster crowing loudly from a cabinet, causing Felix, who’s still living out his Swedish Viking fantasy, to jump up with a battle cry and attack the already silent cabinet. Phil jerks awake in his sleeping bag, eyes wide, and immediately starts talking about basilisk fangs, while Chris runs to Felix, yelling something about a brave knight. Dan looks over at PJ and is met with an equally miserable stare; it’s <em>way too early</em> and <em>way too loud</em>.</p>
<p>Felix loses the rock-paper-scissors and has to come out of the Room first; no one wants to see Filch first thing in the morning, so all his bravery disappears as he sticks his head out, his shoulders still wrapped in the Swedish flag that he refuses to leave in the Room. The corridor is blissfully empty, and Felix breathes out a sigh of relief before heading towards the Gryffindor tower. A very pale PJ follows him, pointedly not looking at Chris, and disappears behind the corner in the direction of the Ravenclaw common room. Phil, who still doesn’t really understand where he is, snaps out of it a little on his floor and leaves the stairs on unsteady feet, leaving Dan to drag a very dejected-looking Chris to their common room in the dungeons and to hope that if Phil walks into the kitchen by accident, the house elves won’t be too mad.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Until Christmas, almost all fourth years are doing nothing but homework, because the teachers unanimously agree that the year before O.W.L.s needs to be filled with as much material as possible. As a cause of that, Dan doesn’t remember much about these months apart from staying up all night to finish another Potions essay and getting lost in the dusty pages in an attempt to learn all the ways in which Gillyweed affects the human organism. Chris keeps trying to organise another meeting of the ‘manly company of bestest buds’ but gives up after his fourth try and disappears, muttering something about boring nerds. That evening Dan finds him in the third-floor corridor, drunkenly telling Peeves a story that’s equal parts tragic and confusing while Peeves is throwing pieces of chalk at him, and has to cast <em>Aguamenti</em> on him so that he can walk to the common room by himself. After that Chris reluctantly agrees to tone it down for a while and even opens <em>One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi</em> for something other than pointing to an Alihotsy and telling Dan that it looks like his mum.</p>
<p>A few days before Christmas break Dan walks out of the Potions classroom, still mad at his Confusing Concoction that refused to thicken, and collides with Phil who, as usual, isn’t paying any attention to his surroundings. They rarely see each other these days: Phil prefers to study in the library, saying that it’s easier to think in there and tiredly rubbing his eyes, and Dan spends all his free time sitting in the Slytherin common room, trying to balance homework with checking on Chris, who lately just sits on his bed and stares at the wall because PJ spends a lot of time with Sophie and last time they all hang out together was in September.</p>
<p>“Hi!” Phil’s face quickly falters, his cheeks heating up as he awkwardly rubs at his neck. “I swear I’m not ignoring or avoiding you, you should understand that we have the same subjects and the same amount of work, I really don’t want to be in the library all the time, believe me, but I feel like I’d sleep in there now if they allowed me, but Madam Pince is against that for some reason, and all I did was fall asleep on my copy of <em>The Monster Book of Monsters</em>, and even that was on accident and nothing happened, and…”</p>
<p>Dan waves his hands at him, ready to interrupt him with an equally incoherent mess of an apology, when he notices that something fell out of Phil’s open bag. He crouches to get a small white box from the floor.</p>
<p>“What’s this?” he asks. To his surprise, Phil goes beet red and starts looking like he’d rather be somewhere else. Raising his eyebrows, Dan turns the box over to see the name.</p>
<p>
  <em>Ultra Coverage - Nourishing Colour Cream. Triple Oils: Avocado, Olive &amp; Shea.</em>
</p>
<p>“Can you promise not to laugh?” Phil’s voice sounds dangerously three octaves higher.</p>
<p>“Phil,” Dan starts giggling almost involuntarily. “Why are you carrying a box of Muggle hair dye around?</p>
<p>Phil turns an even deeper shade of red and drags Dan around the corner with him, away from a particularly loud group of students.</p>
<p>“I hate my hair colour, okay?” Phil hangs his head down, and the only thing Dan can see is his flaming ears. “You’ve seen me, I look like a rusty kettle! Plus I already have a grey strand in the back and I’m sure I got it the night when Filch was lurking around the Room of Requirement, so I needed to do something about it, so,” Phil vaguely gestures to his head, “I did.”</p>
<p>Dan thinks Phil really deserves some sympathy for his insecurities but, as a true friend, he still can’t stop laughing.</p>
<p>“Where did you get it?” he manages to get out.</p>
<p>“My mum sent it to me this morning,” Phil says in a mournful voice. “Just don’t tell Chris, for the love of God, he’ll remind me about it until the day I die. And stop laughing at my suffering!”</p>
<p>“Alright,” Dan takes a deep breath, trying to get over another fit of giggles. “Okay, your secret is safe with me, General Copperhead.”</p>
<p>Phil rolls his eyes and snatches the hair dye away from him. He looks like he wants to say something else but the bell interrupts him, so he just waves at Dan and runs to his next class, his ears still red. Dan shakes his head and heads to Charms, silently apologising to Phil for the years of blackmail he’s about to put him through.</p>
<p>The Christmas break goes by way too fast and seems to only renew the teachers’ strength, causing Chris to start his day by describing for everyone in the Great Hall in great detail what kind of nightmares were preventing him from getting a full eight-hour sleep last night. Dan, who misses sleep just as much as Chris does,  stops trying to shut him up about a week in, sleepily sticks a fork in his sausages, and threatens to throw a bottle of ketchup at Jack Howard that one day decides to start talking about how difficult the next year is going to be. PJ still cheerily waves at them passing by their table and sits next to Sophie; Dan keeps finding them in the library, heads low over a copy of <em>Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them</em>, enthusing about the number of scales found on a Hungarian Horntail’s neck. One evening, when they’re trying to do an especially difficult Transfiguration report, Dan sees Chris watching PJ’s back as he walks out of the dragon section of the library, and kicks him under the table.</p>
<p>“You need to tell him, mate.”</p>
<p>“No offence, my dear Danny, but you’re not the one to give that kind of advice,” Chris sighs and turns back to the diagrams illustrating the transformation of a coffee table into an eagle. Dan has no idea what that means.</p>
<p>Winter gradually turns to spring, but the Easter holidays still don’t look like a proper break. On the last day of the semester, when Dan looks at his cereal and contemplates drowning himself in it, Phil comes up to him to say that he’s going home for Easter.</p>
<p>“My mum’s doing an Easter hunt, the whole family is going to be there, and she wouldn’t let it go until I agreed to come,” he shrugs when Dan asks about that decision. “She says that because I missed the three previous years so my grand-grandma doesn’t remember what I look like anymore, plus I have four new cousins and all seven of my aunties need to tell me how thin and pale I’ve gotten. You know how it is.”</p>
<p>Dan doesn’t know because his parents stopped hiding chocolate eggs around the house once Adrian turns five and they both have officially ‘overgrown’ the Easter hunt, and the last time he saw his cousin was at kindergarten while she was crying because her braids were too tight.</p>
<p>“Happy hunting, Captain Colournut,” he says instead.</p>
<p>Phil tells him, “I hate you.” Dan laughs and realises that the desire to drown himself in cereal has faded away.</p>
<p>The Easter break drags on, and Dan doesn’t know what to do with himself. A mountain of homework turns out to be a hill that is conquered after two evenings in the library, and he still refuses to start revising for exams that are coming in May so studying is no longer an option. He tries looking for Chris and PJ at first, but PJ seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth and Chris appears in the common room only late at night and goes straight to sleep, answering Dan’s questions in grumbles. Dan leaves them to figure their stuff out and goes to search for things to do outside the castle.</p>
<p>It’s finally warm outside and most students choose to spend the sunny days at the Lake. Dan sees Felix and Marzia under a tree, drawing something in a big notepad.</p>
<p>“It’s a story about two pugs in the purgatory,” Marzia tells him, and Dan doesn’t question it because, <em> of course,</em> Marzia would draw two dogs on their way to Hell. “They don’t get along in real life but here they have to work together to get back to their owners.”</p>
<p>“This one’s called Edgar,” Felix points at the grey pug. “He disrespects the authorities, craps everywhere, and swears in German.”</p>
<p>“Felix!” Marzia pokes him with a pencil. “Pugs can’t swear in German, they’re too cute for that. The girl’s name is Maya,” she taps a drawing of a white one-eyed pug with her nail. “She’s an actual princess but a very cool one, which is why she had an eye patch. Edgar is secretly afraid of her.”</p>
<p>“Edgar doesn’t fear anyone!” Felix argues. “I’m going to draw him the Elder wand, and it’s Maya who’s going to be afraid!”</p>
<p>It’s easy to listen to Felix and Marzia’s bickering because he doesn’t need to participate in it. Dan laughs and asks questions where he has to, but he can’t stop thinking about Phil giving the one-eyed pug a stupid name like <em>The Destroyer</em> and has to excuse himself and continue wandering around. He sees Louise next to the greenhouses; she’s from Hufflepuff and he met her through Phil at last year’s Halloween. They’ve seen each other no more than three times since then, but she still calls him <em>darling</em> and introduces him to her friends, fifth-years Zoe and Tania. Dan honestly attempts to hold the conversation for five whole minutes but then they start talking about work opportunities in the Ministry of Magic and he has to run away under the pretence of having a Charms essay to finish. It seems that he’ll have to substitute human interaction with Animagi books for the rest of the break.</p>
<p>That plan fails as well and three days later Madam Pince refuses to let him into the library because ‘no human child can possibly have such passion for learning’, and Dan is left to wander around the castle once again. Next to the Hagrid’s hut, he sees Hazel in a bright green dress, laughing at her own story, while Dodie is strumming her ukulele and laughing at Jack, who looks like he’s eaten one of Hagrid’s dog biscuits. Dan tells himself he’s too socially awkward for this, waves at Dodie that gives him a sunny smile, and sits next to the Lake. He takes out a piece of toast and breaks it apart, throwing it in the Lake. When the giant tentacle disappears under the water Dan remembers that Phil prefers to feed the squid toast with strawberry jam and can’t think of anything else until the end of the day.</p>
<p>Phil comes back the day before the classes start and tells him lots of long stories about his uncles getting divorced and his cousins learning to walk and Dan never wants them to end.</p>
<p>“I love hearing about your family, Phil,” he yawns so that he doesn’t accidentally say it out loud. Phil just smiles back and keeps talking about his four-year-old cousin calling him ‘uncle Phil’ for two weeks.</p>
<p>“How can I already be an uncle?” he asks and almost breaks a glass from gesticulating too much. “Uncles have moustaches and bank accounts, I have neither of those things.”</p>
<p>“Well, you’re huge, full of weird stories, and already going grey,” Dan counts on his fingers. “Yeah, you’re more of a grandpa than an uncle.”</p>
<p>“Our friendship is over,” Phil announces dramatically, clutching his chest, and once Dan stops laughing, gives him a chocolate egg in a silver wrapper. “My mum wouldn’t let me return without promising that I’ll give you this and invite you to come next year.” His cheeks pinken. “And you can’t say no, I can’t take two more weeks with that many children around.”</p>
<p>“Phil, I can’t say no to your mum that laid me such a beautiful egg,” Dan says, deadpan, and gets kicked under the table. He feels strangely pleased when he notices Phil blush even more.</p>
<p>Next day they all meet in the library to do History of Magic homework, and Dan is relieved to see Chris and PJ behave normally once again. Chris says that for giving them so much to write about magical dictators Binns himself should be considered one and PJ asks if he knows anything about Voldemort. Chris nearly drives him mad pretending that he’s never heard of Voldemort, and Dan has to retract his statement about behaving normally but still feels that everything is back where it should be.</p>
<p>“Alright, you idiot,” PJ grumbles as Chris keeps giggling, very pleased with himself. “When asked about tyrants in the twentieth century, half the class is going to write about Voldemort and the rest will make do with Grindelwald. We have to think outside the box.”</p>
<p>“What about Umbridge?” Dan suggests, reluctantly flipping through <em>The Greatest Wizards of the Twentieth Century</em>. “Judging by what I read about her, she’s up there with the tyrants.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, her Educational Decrees were something else,” Phil agrees. “I don’t think you’re going to find her in the list of the greatest wizards, though.”</p>
<p>PJ scans the books on the shelf closest to him and reaches out to take one, impatiently looking through the table of contents.</p>
<p>“<em>One hundred and fifty latest Educational Decrees, all changes included</em>,” he announces, putting the book on the table. “If you’re interested, of course. Number twenty-four, no extracurricular activities,” he reads aloud, “number twenty-six, no information irrelevant to the subject, number twenty-nine, allowing corporal punishment… Jeez, was there also detention for breathing?”</p>
<p>“You missed the most interesting one,” Chris points out, looking over PJ’s shoulder and underlining the line in question with his fingernail. “Number thirty-one, male and female students have to be at least eight inches apart at all times. Those guys must’ve had it rough. Well, actually,” he gestures vaguely at Dan and Phil, “you two’d be okay even then.”</p>
<p>Dan frowns in confusion and PJ sends Chris a pointed look.</p>
<p>“What?” he shrugs. “You’re no fun. Dibs on Umbridge!” Chris grabs the book and sprints towards the other end of the library. PJ jumps from his chair and runs after him.</p>
<p>“That’s not fair! Wait, you slime, I was the one who found the book!”</p>
<p>They disappear behind the shelves and Dan looks at Phil, still confused. Phil just shrugs and returns to his list of books, and Dan can’t shake off the feeling that he once again misses the joke that everyone else understands.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Alternative Chapter Title: Dan Howell and Let The Gays Begin</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Year Five</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“No,” Chris exclaims one Saturday in October, dropping a giant book on the table and causing it to shake. “I can’t do this. This is torture. Wrap me in a sheet and bury me in a swamp.”</p>
<p>“If you keep doing this to the books, this is exactly what Madam Pince will do to you,” Dan points out, although they’ve already spent countless hours in the library, the weather is surprisingly good, and his aching head refuses to make sense of <em>Self-Defensive Spellwork</em> any longer, so he has to agree with Chris’s outburst. He casts a longing look at the Quidditch field. Maybe he needs to join the team next year just so he has an actual excuse not to do homework.</p>
<p>Chris grumbles for a little while longer, stopping only when PJ’s hand comes to rest at his head, and Dan has to look at whatever book he’s reading to avoid rolling his eyes. In comparison to last year, the amount of unnecessary touching has at least quadrupled, and even though Chris never shied away from groping the ones closest to him and PJ always reacted way too calmly to the whole thing, Dan still prefers not to think about what it can mean.</p>
<p>Phil lightly kicks him under the table.</p>
<p>“Tom said that Flitwick found a Boggart in his office yesterday and hasn’t gotten rid of it yet,” he whispers conspiratorially. “We can leave these nerds to it and go have a little practical lesson.”</p>
<p>“A practical lesson?” Chris asks loudly before Dan can even nod in agreement. “Is this what you kids call it these days? I’m offended, really, you can stop hiding and say it as it is.”</p>
<p>“But there’s really a Boggart in there,” Phil says, confused. “And there’s a big possibility we’re going to have them at O.W.L.s, so I’d practice while I can.”</p>
<p>Chris sighs and waves his hands at him. “Oh, do what you want. Just remember to use protection.”</p>
<p>“Well, yeah.” Phil looks questioningly at Dan and he nods, closing <em>Self-Defensive Spellwork</em> and throwing it in his bag. “This is the point of Defense Against the Dark Arts, isn’t it?”</p>
<p>Chris looks like he’s ready to look up at the heavens and ask Merlin’s suspenders for help, but Phil’s already gotten up to his feet and rolled up his parchment, so Dan has to save his witty retorts for later. Flitwick usually returns to his office after spending a few hours at Hogsmeade with other teachers after lunch, so they really don’t have that much time.</p>
<p>On their way to Flitwick’s office Phil’s talking about another magical creature that Hagrid introduced them to and Dan, rather impolitely, doesn’t really listen to that, resorting to just humming noncommittally at certain parts. In his defence, all Phil’s stories end up in one of the two ways: either ‘and we immediately became best friends, sorry, Dan’, or ‘and then Madam Pomfrey had to regrow my bones <em>again</em>’, and Dan’s already learned that the creature’s size and all potential dangers that come with it are never a clue to how the story will end.</p>
<p>“What do you think yours will be?” Phil asks once he finishes talking about Nifflers and they stop at Flitwick’s door. Dan makes a noncommittal noise, still in his head.</p>
<p>“We’ll see, I guess,” he says and pushes the door open because Flitwick never deems it important to lock it. He really doesn’t know because they take a very theoretical approach to Boggarts. During their third year, they learn that Boggarts take the form of a person’s biggest fear and no one knows what they actually look like, but they never deal with a real Boggart - no one wants to uncover someone’s childhood trauma right in the beginning of the semester. It doesn’t stop Chris from spending three weeks spreading rumours about  Felix’s Boggart being a giant meatball, but that comes to a rather abrupt end when Felix asks very loudly and for everyone in the Great Hall to hear why doesn’t <em>Chrissy boy</em> tell them about his Boggart, which makes Chris turn a colour that Godrick Gryffindor would be proud of and leg it to the common room, never mentioning it again.</p>
<p>They look around the office, trying to figure out where the Boggart might be hiding, and both jump a little when something moves in the wardrobe.</p>
<p>“Scared?” Dan grins, hiding his shaking hands in his pockets.</p>
<p>“In your dreams,” Phil snorts but eyes the wardrobe wearily.</p>
<p>“Open the wardrobe, then.”</p>
<p>“I will,” Phil says with conviction and stays glued to his spot. Dan arches his eyebrow.</p>
<p>“What seems to be the problem, Philly?”</p>
<p>“I think that it’s better if you open the wardrobe, because…” Phil stalls. “Because I’ll trip over my own feet, fall face-first into the wardrobe, and scare the Boggart away! Yeah!”</p>
<p>“I’m prepared to take that risk,” Dan solemnly clutches his chest. “Come on, Phil, you’ve already agreed.”</p>
<p>“Rock-paper-scissors? So it’s fair?” Phil sounds close to panic and Dan, making a whole spectacle of considering the offer, agrees. On the count of three, he shows paper and can’t help but giggle when Phil’s triumphant smile falters; he shows a rock.</p>
<p>“There you go,” Dan shrugs and steps to the side, pleased with himself. Phil mutters something about it <em>still being unfair</em> but gets his wand out and rolls up his sleeves.</p>
<p>“<em>Alohomora!</em>”</p>
<p>The wardrobe’s doors fly open and an enormous black horse springs outside, its mane flowing in the nonexistent wind. It looks at least twice as big as the wardrobe and seems to keep growing in size, sending unfriendly glances Phil’s way. When the horse stomps its hooves, Dan’s fingers involuntarily grip the edge of the desk. If he understands that it’s just an illusion and still is shaking like a leaf, then what’s going through Phil’s head while he’s standing face to face with his actual nightmare?</p>
<p>Phil, pale as the wall behind him, stumbles backwards and grips his wand tighter.</p>
<p>“<em>Riddikulus!</em>”</p>
<p>There’s a loud pop. The horse shrinks to its regular size and falls on its back, comically dangling its legs in a fruitless attempt to get up. Phil’s laugh sounds more like a sigh of relief and he waves at Dan impatiently, moving further back.</p>
<p>“Your turn, Howell!”</p>
<p>Dan rips himself away from the desk and faces the boggart, telling himself that his legs aren’t shaking at all. There’s another pop, and the horse disappears in a whirl of grey smoke to become Dan’s mum.</p>
<p>He immediately forgets everything about magical creatures and spells because his mum looks <em>so real</em>. She’s wearing the same old plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves that are too long and ripped jeans, she has the same tiny wrinkles under her eyes, and her fingers are covered in blue ink as if she was writing on random pieces of paper again instead of typing on her computer. She lifts up her head to look tiredly at Dan.</p>
<p>“I don’t like that you waste your time on that magic.”</p>
<p>Dan jerks away from her, feeling like he’s been slapped. He shakes his head, trying to remember that it’s just a vision when his mum speaks again.</p>
<p>“Come home, Dan, while it’s not too late. Come home while you still can become normal again.”</p>
<p>“<em>Riddikulus!</em>” Dan shouts without thinking, gripping his wand so tight that his fingers are going numb.</p>
<p>
  <em>Pop.</em>
</p>
<p>His dad is standing where his mum used to be, pushing his glasses up his nose and shaking his head in disapproval.</p>
<p>“We had such high hopes for you,” his voice comes, and Dan’s ears feel like they’re filled with cotton. “You could’ve gone so far, you could’ve become a lawyer. You could’ve had a good life but you chose this sorry excuse for a school instead. I regret not forbidding you to go.”</p>
<p>His disappointed eyes are boring a hole in Dan’s soul as he raises his wand again.</p>
<p>“<em>Riddikulus!</em>”</p>
<p>“I thought my older brother would be setting me a good example.” Adrian materialises out of thin air, and Dan looks at his disgusted face in horror. “But no, you turned out to be a <em>freak</em>.”</p>
<p>“<em>Riddikulus!</em>” Dan gets out through a lump in his throat and closes his eyes, praying that it ends, that it disappears so he can return to his regular life, so…</p>
<p>“I don’t even know why I’m still wasting my time on you.” It’s Phil. Dan knew that he would appear as soon as he saw his mother standing before him. “Just an awkward and weird Muggleborn. There are so many people better than you.”</p>
<p>Dan opens his eyes and immediately regrets it: this Phil is too real, he folds his arms and cocks his head to the side in the same way, only his eyes are ice cold. Dan looks at him long enough to believe that they never looked any different.</p>
<p>“How could you think we were really best friends?” Phil smirks, cold and cruel. “A Hufflepuff hanging out with a Slytherin, what a perfect example of interhouse friendship! If you weren’t so pathetic by yourself, I wouldn’t ever even look at you.”</p>
<p>Dan steps back, again and again until he knocks into a wall. His breathing is getting heavier, a fog is covering his eyes, but Phil’s words keep feeling like needles on his skin.</p>
<p>“You can’t maintain a healthy relationship even with your own family but want to try and do it with someone else? Face it, Dan, you’re a total loser, and everybody sees it but y-...”</p>
<p>Suddenly a figure appears in front of Phil, causing him to stumble over his words and turn into a formless dark cloud.</p>
<p>“<em>RIDDIKULUS!</em>”</p>
<p>The cloud gets smaller and smaller and then disappears. The wardrobe doors close with a bang, and in deafening silence Dan drops his wand and feels his legs give out.</p>
<p>Phil is standing next to him - the real Phil who has kind eyes and warm features, who grips his wand with both hands and looks at Dan like he’s just seen a ghost. Dan can only vaguely shrug and hug his knees to his chest, trying to calm his heart erratically beating against his ribs. He hears Phil mutter <em>Colloportus</em> just in case and come closer, unsure of what to do next. Then he sits on the floor next to Dan.</p>
<p>A few minutes pass in silence. Dan thinks that if Phil was going to laugh or run away, he would’ve done that by now, and sighs. He feels like that twelve-year-old boy that saw a reflection of his happy family in the magical mirror again.</p>
<p>“My mum is so worried,” he says, not lifting his head. “All the time. Whenever I tell her anything she just turns it into another reason to be worried. No, she’s my mum, I get it, she’s going to worry, but I think she’s decided long ago that one day she’ll receive a matchbox with my remains because I pointed my wand in the wrong direction.”</p>
<p>Phil is silent but Dan knows he’s listening, so he continues, still addressing the floor.</p>
<p>“My dad doesn’t say anything, but he’d also like something different for me, something,” he swallows, “<em>normal</em>. He and my mum always used to talk about how Adrian and I will grow up and be successful and live a life without worries, and it’s all gone now, as if me having magical abilities somehow prevents me from still being that in the future. And Adrian…” Dan pauses and takes a shaky breath. “He loves the sweets that I bring every summer and I’m pretty sure he still sleeps with that tiger that I transfigured from his socks last year even though he’ll never admit it, but it’s like he doesn’t care about anything else. None of them do. It’s like my ability to wave a wooden stick and make a door open is my defining quality now, and they still haven’t decided if they should be afraid of that or not,” Dan’s voice breaks. Looking at his feet seems safe because there’s a possibility that when he looks up at Phil he’ll see nothing but pity and a condescending smile.</p>
<p>Phil doesn’t say anything for so long that Dan manages to convince himself that he’s left at the very beginning of his little speech and starts planning his new life as a hermit, because no one will ever want to talk to him after this horrific fail when Phil finally speaks up.</p>
<p>“It’s your family, Dan, and of course they’re going to be worried, no matter what you do. Even if you became that physics guy…” Phil stumbles over an unfamiliar word and Dan doesn’t smile but is very close to it. “Well, that guy that looks at those tiny particles that make up everything. They’d still be worried because they love you and want you to succeed. But they understand those tiny particles,” Dan’s still looking at the ground but he doesn’t need to see Phil to know that he’s waving his arms around, “and they don’t understand magic, so they worry a little more. They just need a little time. I’m sure they are trying to support you as best as they can, they just don’t really know how to do it because they’ve never been to Hogwarts and they don’t know how cool it is.”</p>
<p>Dan feels Phil’s hand on his shoulder and lifts his head up sharply, meeting his gaze.</p>
<p>“It was just a vision.” Phil’s hand is still there, warm and sure. “A powerless ghost created by your imagination, and trust me, he didn’t say a word of truth. Not a single one.”</p>
<p>Somehow Dan feels that this isn’t about his parents anymore, but Phil looks like the most important thing to him right now is to convince Dan to believe him. Dan looks at him until he forgets all about the Boggart.</p>
<p>“I know,” he breathes out. “Thanks, Phil.”</p>
<p>Phil smiles, relieved, and puts his hand away.</p>
<p>“You scared me so much,” he admits, leaning back against the wall. “I never thought I’d see myself jumping out of the wardrobe to say threatening things. It’s not a good look for me.”</p>
<p>Dan pokes him in the side, even though Phil’s words make his heart skip another beat. “Speaking of things jumping out of the wardrobe. A horse? Are you serious?”</p>
<p>“Oh god,” Phil groans, hiding his face in his hands. “How can you even ask that? You saw that thing, it was the size of Hogwarts!”</p>
<p>“A <em>horse</em>, Phil,” Dan repeats, giggling. “It’s basically a wingless hippogriff. With a slightly different head.”</p>
<p>“I don’t trust them! They have those legs,” Phil flails his arms in a weak attempt to demonstrate a horse, “and those teeth and their tails are weird, and they look like they’re getting ready to kick you at any second.”</p>
<p>“Yes, truly terrible creatures,” Dan agrees solemnly but can’t keep a straight face for too long and starts giggling again.</p>
<p>“You’re the worst person in the world,” Phil tells him, but there’s laughter dancing in his eyes so it’s easy for Dan to believe that he doesn’t quite mean that.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Once it starts getting close to Christmas, Chris is the one talking about practical lessons.</p>
<p>“Hear me out: the possibility that they’ll ask us about Patronuses is pretty high, right?”</p>
<p>Phil shakes his head. “Well, if you believe McGonagall, if there’s a question on Patronuses it’ll be a strictly theoretical one, and even that’s very unlikely because it’s such complex magic, and…”</p>
<p>“The possibility is very high,” Chris repeats loudly, not paying attention to him, “so we need to be ready for everything. And what’s a better way to test our theoretical knowledge than in practice? That leaves us only one choice, gentlemen, and it’s to conjure a Patronus of our own.”</p>
<p>“How do you suggest we do it?”Dan asks. He already knows not to trust Chris’s ideas, but he also knows not to shut him down straight away, lest he keeps on bugging them out of spite. “Should we all gather around a mirror at midnight and chant Patronus, Patronus until one appears in all its dazzling glory?”</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t know how you choose to spend your free time, Howell, but there’s this little thing called a Patronus Charm,” Chris informs him and ignores him muttering <em>like I didn’t know that</em>. “You need to think of your happiest memory, which I’m not sure you’re capable of since your life’s so bleak and dramatic, you flick your wand, and bam! You have a Patronus!”</p>
<p>“You’re just missing one tiny detail,” Dan snorts after deciding that Chris doesn’t deserve to receive a <em>Furnunculus</em> to the face because of that comment about his life. “Don’t you need a Dementor for your Patronus to appear?”</p>
<p>“Of course, we can dress you up in black robes and shoot spells at you,” Phil continues, “and maybe it’ll become my personal happiest memory, however…”</p>
<p>“We can find real Dementors,” PJ says suddenly.</p>
<p>Phil stops mid-sentence and they all stare at him.</p>
<p>“I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible. We were wandering around the castle at night so many times and never got caught, which means we can get out unnoticed as well,” PJ keeps going, as if unaware of three pairs of eyes looking at him in disbelief. “We go to the Forbidden Forest and travel on the Thestrals from there, they’ll know where to go. Well, that’s if you really want to try out the Patronus Charm,” he says, amusement in his voice mixing with a hint of challenge.</p>
<p>Dan starts saying something about PJ not possibly being serious but Chris interrupts him.</p>
<p>“I’m so proud of deciding to come and talk to you that one day!” he exclaims and runs up to PJ to kiss him on the mouth.</p>
<p>Dan blinks, unsure if he should believe his eyes. When the scene doesn’t change after a few moments of intense blinking, he has no other choice.</p>
<p>“Um,” he coughs. “What’s going on?”</p>
<p>“You can come closer to get a better view,” Chris tells him, and PJ just winks at him from behind Chris’s shoulder.</p>
<p>“Thanks, I’m good,” Dan’s voice goes an octave higher. “But I’d still appreciate a clarification?”</p>
<p>“My God, Howell.” Chris removes himself from PJ just enough to give Dan an exasperated look. “I know you’re not the smartest cookie in this cookie jar, but you really should work on seeing things that are past your nose. Although you’re not that good at seeing things that are right in front of your face either, so I’m not sure you’ll be able to follow that advice.”</p>
<p>Dan ignores the weird insults. “How long?”</p>
<p>“Six months,” PJ says, looking incredibly pleased with that number.</p>
<p>“I’d be offended that you pay so little attention to your best friends that that’s news to you, but since we’re not doing this whole Patronus thing, I’ve got other stuff to do, so excuse me,” Chris grabs PJ’s hand and tugs him away. PJ just shrugs, not really resisting, and they both disappear behind a corner.</p>
<p>“Where are you… no, actually, don’t respond, I’m not sure I want to know,” Dan mutters and shakes his head just in case he really did make this whole thing up. “Is this actually happening?”</p>
<p>“It is.” Phil looks way too calm and Dan immediately tells him that. “What’s so weird about it?” Phil shrugs. “The way I see it, they finally figured everything out and stopped stressing each other and everyone around them out. Good for them.”</p>
<p>“But they didn’t tell us anything! How was I supposed to know, by reading their mind?”</p>
<p>“Maybe you really should work on your observation skills, Dan,” Phil says and Dan makes a mental note to finally figure out what the hell that means.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Dan sees all four of them walk into the Great Hall as if he’s watching a film. It looks like it’s dinner time, but Chris and PJ sit down across the table from him and Phil, like there’s no such thing as different tables for different Houses, and the rest of the students morph into a faceless crowd, talking, laughing, and clinking their forks. Dan looks at Chris that seems to be in the middle of one of his <em>hilarious</em> stories.</p>
<p>“... so I don’t really know how I got out of that hole,” he hears. “But then again, I've been in many holes in my life, so you may as well call me the hole expert.”</p>
<p>PJ snorts and jabs him in the side. Chris has a grin on his face and Dan wants to roll his eyes but suddenly feels Phil’s eyes on him. He turns to him to ask what’s wrong, but the words don’t come.</p>
<p>“Give us a moment,” Phil tells someone, still looking at Dan, and takes his hand. Dan blinks, and the walls of the Great Hall turn into the dark trees of the Forbidden Forest.</p>
<p>Dan jerks back on pure instinct, but Phil’s still holding his hand so he can’t get far. He lifts his gaze, hoping that the starry skies will remind him that there’s more to the world than the tree branches rustling threateningly in the milky fog, but he sees nothing but darkness and heavy clouds, settling on top of the trees. Dan closes his eyes and has to remind himself to breathe.</p>
<p>“Dan,” Phil’s voice sounds far away and it’s so easy to believe that he’s utterly alone, surrounded by the ring of trees and impenetrable darkness.</p>
<p>Dan squeezes his eyes shut, fighting off the feeling of dread.</p>
<p>“Dan.” Two hands cup his face, warm and sure, sending shivers down Dan’s spine. Phil is here, even though he still sounds very far away. “Dan, open your eyes.”</p>
<p>Dan is still paralysed by fear; it’s impossible for Phil not to feel him shaking in his hands. Dan wants to know how Phil can even ask him for such a thing, when he hears Phil’s voice right in his ear, loud and clear, talking over the panicked beating of his heart.</p>
<p>“Dan, do you trust me?”</p>
<p>Dan’s eyes fly open on their own accord and amidst the rapidly narrowing ring of trees, he sees Phil. Phil is standing so close to him - closer than when he’s copying his History of Magic essay over his shoulder, closer than when he’s stealing the last piece of toast, closer than when he’s holding his wand over him in the Duelling Club in their second year. Phil is standing so close that Dan can see little specks of yellow surrounding his pupils.</p>
<p>Phil leans in and they’re breathing in the same air, when Dan is jerked awake to find himself in his bed, looking around the moonlit Slytherin bedroom.</p>
<p>Chris snores in his bed and mutters something about the Moomins, which confirms Dan’s suspicions that he’s no longer asleep, yet his heart is still hammering against his chest. Dan shakes his head and reaches for the glass of water, trying to even out his breathing. Whatever it is that the house elves put in there works, and Dan falls back on his pillow, staring at the ceiling with wide eyes. Sleep doesn’t seem like an option at the moment, although the clock on his bedside table is showing that it’s three-thirty in the morning, and his thoughts naturally revert back to the dream. He’ll analyse it and only then decide if he should panic or not.</p>
<p>Chris really makes way too many inappropriate jokes and the fact that Dan’s subconscious is now able to recreate Chris in such a realistic way just goes to show that Dan should’ve moved away from him after the very first hello, so he doesn’t dwell on that. The Forbidden Forest doesn’t come as a surprise either: Dan’s fear of the trees and the dark never went away despite him being able to conjure light with a flick of his wand. The deep dark forest rapidly closing in on him becomes a permanent fixture in his nightmares back during his first year when Filch caught them sneaking around the castle at night and they spent a few hours in the forest looking for some mystical berries, spooked beyond belief by the stories about werewolves and banshees. In the morning, when Phil shrugged and said that they’d just have to be more careful next time, Dan tripped him so that he fell face-first into an anthill and promised himself never to try new things again.</p>
<p>That promise went out of the window the very next day when Phil started explaining the ways in which Gillyweed and peanut butter were perfect together. He was wrong.</p>
<p>At the thought of Phil Dan’s face heats up; he still feels the ghost of the warm fingers on his face. That part was so drastically different from any other dreams he’s had that he doesn’t really know what to feel. Talking to anyone about it would be useless. PJ would just shake his head, exasperated, and give him a look that you’d give a cute but a very dumb puppy that keeps consistently walking into a glass door. Chris would make it his calling in life to remind Dan about that dream every day, and once he’s dead he’d come back as a ghost to join PJ in his tormented sighs and <em>how-are-you-not-tired-from-being-this-stupid</em> looks. Dan admits to himself that he can’t edit his dream down to the point of sharing it with Phil, turns to his side, and continues thinking.</p>
<p>When the first lights of the upcoming day appear in the sky, Dan feels so exhausted from keeping himself anxious that he closes his eyes and thinks that it’s not so bad. At the end of the day, Phil’s his best friend; and what if he dreamt about the Giant Squid instead? He’s heard Madam Pomfrey telling someone about hormones and puberty when he went to visit Hazel after an unsuccessful attempt at <em>Furnunculus</em> in the hospital wing last week, so he decides to go with that explanation for now. The last thought he has before falling asleep is that he’d prefer Phil to the Giant Squid in any situation.</p>
<p>It’s still hard to look Phil in the eye for the remainder of the week and Dan tries to focus on the mole above his right eyebrow when talking to him and thanks every item in Merlin’s wardrobe that no one pays enough attention to him to notice that. Gradually the dream fades away and disappears, and when Phil comes up to him two days before the Easter break to invite him to spend the holidays with him, awkwardly shuffling his feet, Dan doesn’t think about it at all.</p>
<p>“My mum’s just complaining that we’ve abandoned her. Martyn’s spending Easter with Cornelia’s parents - she’s in Beauxbaton, so they can see each other only during holidays,” he clarifies, seeing a question in Dan’s eyes. “She says that she needs to have at least one child in the house for Easter to continue being a family holiday.”</p>
<p>“And why do you need me there?” Dan asks just because he needs to stall for another thirty seconds so he doesn’t agree to anything embarrassingly fast.</p>
<p>“Is my desire to spend time with my best friend not enough for you?” Phil tries very hard to look offended but quickly deflates under Dan’s pointed look. “Fine, I’m just afraid that she’ll give me so much to do around the house that I won’t be back in time for O.W.L.s and I hope that with you around I won’t have to do anything.”</p>
<p>Dan clutches his chest and feigns a dramatic attempt to fall out of his chair. “So you’re using me to distract older women? I’m never working with you at Herbology again!”</p>
<p>“Shut up,” Phil tells him, his ears going pink. “I’m serious, come with me? I know I told you all sorts of horrors about last year, but it’s really not that bad, the children go to bed very early and we can hang out in the house, and I swear there are not as many gnomes in the garden as I made it sound… hey, how long have you been nodding?”</p>
<p>Dan giggles and goes to pack a bag, leaving Phil to yell, ‘This is going to be the best break EVER!’ so loudly that it scares the Fat Friar. Phil couldn’t really think that Dan would rather spend two weeks in an empty castle than in the house of an actual wizard family.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Phil uses the time of their journey to London to talk all about the Lester family gatherings and Dan has to move to the opposite side of the compartment to avoid getting punched in the face by accident.</p>
<p>“Auntie Elle was here last year, so I don’t think she’ll come again which is good, because she breeds newts and will make you look at the pictures of her aquariums, and you better make all sorts of comments about how good they look,” Phil shudders, apparently remembering a particularly vivid part of last year’s newt torture. “Auntie Dahlia usually comes with her three children, seven grandchildren and a very grumpy husband, his name is Tom or Tod, I try to stay away from him so I still don’t know his name. Both my grandmas should be here, but they are usually sitting on the terrace talking about the Second Wizarding War and only come down to pinch the first available grandchild on the cheek, so… Hey, how dare you fall asleep to me talking about my relatives!”</p>
<p>Dan, who really started to doze off, jerks and bangs his head against a wall.</p>
<p>“Shut up,” he grumbles when Phil says something about karma. “Seriously, Phil, I’m sure all your aunts and uncles are all extremely extraordinary people and I’d like nothing more than to hear all about them, but unfortunately your family is the size of a small village, so can you really blame me for losing interest somewhere around your seventeenth cousin?”</p>
<p>Phil pouts. “Well, then I’m not going to warn you about uncle Gabriel who spends every Thursday evening in the shed with spiders, where he… Anyway,” he interrupts himself. “The less we talk about uncle Gabriel, the better.”</p>
<p>“Phil,” Dan looks at him, scandalised. “Don’t tell me you’re <em>ashamed of your roots</em>?”</p>
<p>“Well, if you knew the whole truth…” Phil starts but then notices Dan pointedly looking at his hair. “You know what? I changed my mind. You’re no longer invited. I’ll help you open the window so you can jump out and walk back to Hogwarts.”</p>
<p>There’s no anger in Phil’s voice, and Dan lets himself laugh at his own joke until they reach King’s Cross. There’s a short woman in yellow robes waiting for them at the station, easily recognisable as Phil’s mum.</p>
<p>“It’s a good thing you got here so fast, boys,” she looks Phil up and down, shaking her head. “Honestly, if you don’t stop growing we’ll have to get new doors, and not everyone can afford that in this economy. Oh well, we can’t deprive grandma Mary of the opportunity to tell you how much you’ve grown, can we?” Once she finishes fussing around Phil, he turns to Dan. “You’re Dan, I assume? It’s very nice to finally meet you, after everything that Phil’s told us about you.”</p>
<p>Phil immediately turns beet red and Dan refuses to acknowledge his heart skipping a beat.</p>
<p>“What can I do if my existence is so interesting,” he says. Phil’s mum fondly rolls her eyes and ruffles his hair, and he feels wordlessly accepted into the family.</p>
<p>They apparate to the Lesters’ house straight from the Platform, and Dan forgets that his ears didn’t really want to leave London as soon as he walks through the front door. They go through a big living room with a giant fireplace with all sorts of pots with something green on it, and Dan looks at the bookcase filled with strange names like <em>Charm Your Own Cheese</em> and <em>Bestiarium Magicum</em> with wonder in his eyes. Mrs Lester quickly disappears in the kitchen, from where Dan hears her complain about it being impossible to leave the magic unattended even in the twenty-first century, and sends her knitting away with a flick of her wand, the angry needles nearly poking Dan’s eye out.</p>
<p>“Why don’t you show Dan your room, Phil?” she pokes her head out of the kitchen once she’s done scolding the pans. “Your dad isn’t going to be back for another few hours, so dinner will have to wait.”</p>
<p>“She means that you’ll be sleeping with me,” Phil clarifies and immediately stutters. “I mean, in my room. Yes.”</p>
<p>To his own surprise, Dan is unable to say anything until they get to Phil’s room, even though Phil trips on the stairs at least three times and Dan never passes up an opportunity to laugh at him. Once they’re upstairs, he’s shocked by how Phil’s room is perfect for <em>Phil</em>, full of bright colours that should all be clashing but somehow don’t. There’s a bed with greeny-blue covers in the corner, a yellow Hufflepuff scarf on the wall and a lot of film posters, and Dan sees something about the troll academy, a hundred-year curse of the bloodthirsty banshee, and a magical palm tree. Winston’s tank is on the table, disappearing under a pile of parchments and old quills, and he greets Dan by opening and closing one eye. Textbooks are piled up next to the opposite wall.</p>
<p>“They’ll transfigure you a bed over there later,” Phil waves in that direction. “They didn’t have the time yet. I mean, it’s no Taj Mahal, but…”</p>
<p>“It’s perfect,” Dan breathes out, and Phil’s smile is almost blinding.</p>
<p>“I can show you the attic! Mum’s always said there’s a wolf up there.” He runs out of the room and shouts down the stairs, “Mum! Is there a wolf in the attic?”</p>
<p>“Yes!” Mrs Lester’s voice comes, and Phil rubs his hands excitedly.</p>
<p>“Let’s go! Or are you scared?”</p>
<p>Phil’s eyes are sparkling blue with challenge and laughter, and Dan would be okay if there was a mountain troll in the attic as well.</p>
<p>“Only in your dreams.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Alternative Chapter Title: Dan Howell and This Is Not A Boner For My Best Friend</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Year Six</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sometimes Dan can’t help but wonder if he’d spend less time studying had he decided that magic wasn’t for him and gone to a regular Muggle school, similar to the one where his brother Adrian is now learning algebra and chemistry. No, mathematical equations still look terrifying and Dan wants to poke them with his wand so that the unknowns crawl away from the textbook instead of scaring young impressionable children, and when Adrian shows him the chemical formulas he starts to think he isn’t the only one in his family studying magic. Still, Adrian clearly doesn’t spend all his free time in the library until his eyes start to water from the dust, and even if he does, the books definitely don’t tell him that he needs disinfection if he sneezes one too many times.</p>
<p>Dan would prefer to study in the Slytherin common room with comfortable armchairs and couches where he can stretch his legs out and not be subjected to angry whispers about him disrespecting the ancient works, but he learns from experience that it’s not as easy as that. The first-years cheer too loudly after winning a game of Gobstones, Muggleborn students screech in fear after noticing someone’s rat, the third-years sigh dramatically after being assigned starting a dream diary for the first time, and on top of that, Chris starts telling everyone within his earshot exactly how his relationship with his boyfriend PJ progresses. The boyfriend in question is sitting in the Ravenclaw Tower, unable to stop him, so Chris is gradually raising the rating of his stories; the last thing Dan hears before storming out of the common room is him speculating whether he wants to sleep with PJ, marry or kill him. If he wants to keep his friendship with both of them, he really doesn’t need to know Chris’s reasoning behind sleeping with PJ, then marrying him and then killing him so he can sleep with him again.</p>
<p>Actually, Dan seeks solace in the library not simply because he’s hiding from his overly oversharing friends. ‘A long and exciting journey to your true Animagus form’ that’s promised to him by the author of <em>Powers You Never Knew You Had and What To Do With Them Now You've Wised Up</em> is way too long and not nearly exciting enough, and Dan scans the names of the books in the Charms section, hoping to find something that’ll speed up the process. It feels like he’s read more on Animagi in the last two years than on all the goblin uprisings for Professor Binns and he wants to move from theory to practice. Yet all he finds are very graphic descriptions of injuries that await anyone who rushes to change their form too soon.</p>
<p>He opens and flips through <em>Olde and Forgotten Bewitchments and Charms</em> without much hope. As far as Dan knows, those medieval scientists loved following rules more than anything, so even if he does find a relevant spell, it’ll just slow things down even further. Dan turns the page, and his mouth falls open. The empty spaces next to E. Limus's long-winded descriptions of witch hunts are covered in someone’s writing.</p>
<p>His surprise (someone managed to return that and avoid being publicly executed by Madam Pince?) quickly turns into curiosity, and Dan sits at the nearest table to examine the writings. Most of them openly make fun of Limus’s musings, and Dan has to hide his inappropriately loud laughter behind his hand after a writing next to a particularly long paragraph says, <em>I’ve seen radishes smarter than him</em>. He flips through a few more pages, seeing writings become diagrams and formulas, and at the end of chapter seven, Dan finds a long list of spells under the title of <em>this is more useful</em>. Some of them have <em>nvrbl</em> written next to them, and Dan’s eyes light up.</p>
<p>Professor Flitwick introduces them to the nonverbal spells about a week ago and talks for a long time about the possibilities and advantages that come with performing magic without saying a word. While most students listen intently and exchange excited whispers, Felix keeps throwing <em>you-need-to-try-harder-to-impress-me</em> glances Flitwick’s way and at the end of the lesson says that those nonverbal spells sound so unimpressive that he could probably protect himself from them just using his Swedish powers. Flitwick doesn’t move a muscle, yet in the next moment, Felix finds himself floating in the air before dropping back into his chair and looks around with wild eyes.</p>
<p>“Homework,” Flitwick says, nonplussed. “Mr Kjellberg, I’m sure your Swedish powers will gladly help you to write it down.”</p>
<p>After that, the whole class is dying to learn to cast curses on their friends in complete silence, and those spells in the priceless work of E. Limus seem like a perfect starting point to Dan. He copies the most interesting spells on the piece of parchment and waits for the right moment to arrive. Phil falls his first and only victim to Levicorpus because he had the misfortune of feeding the Giant Squid at the empty Lake.</p>
<p>“I’m going to sue you,” Phil tells him, but his threat has zero effect because he’s hanging upside down in the air. “The Wizengamot will be on my side because your behaviour is unacceptable.”</p>
<p>“On what grounds will I be arrested?” Dan asks, laughing.</p>
<p>“Animal cruelty, of course!” Phil waves his arms around comically and causes Dan to stop laughing and send him a questioning look. “You scared Larry away! Interrupted breakfast will surely count as animal cruelty!”</p>
<p>Dan just rolls his eyes and says a counter-curse, letting Phil fall back on the grass because, <em>of course,</em> Phil is feeding the giant squid breakfast and, <em>of course</em>, Phil calls it Larry, and the sun isn’t nearly up far enough for Dan to be okay with that.</p>
<p>In time he learns to use another spell that is a great success not just with Phil, but also with PJ. They make a habit of casting <em>Muffliato</em> on unsuspecting Chris to watch him shake his head with confusion trying to get rid of the faint buzz in his ears as they talk in theatrical whispers next to him, complete with big eyes and secretive glances. Once Chris understands what’s going on, he gives them a long speech on trust and betrayal which accomplishes a grand total of nothing, and Dan keeps leaning in to PJ every morning to tell him what wonderful weather they’re having as Chris watches them with a buzz in his ears and a pout on his face.</p>
<p>Not every subject fills Dan with such excitement as Charms. He’s already questioned his ability to make decisions during O.W.L.s because he chose to study Numerology in his third year not taking into account how difficult the exam was going to be, and the first few weeks of his sixth year don’t make him think any differently. Previous semesters have him writing down lectures on magical properties of numbers seven and twelve only to open <em>New Theory of Numerology</em> later and write countless essays on the specifics of numbers three and nine; now they are starting to go deeper into the predictive part of Numerology and Dan finds himself reading the words in his textbook and failing to see how they make any sense.</p>
<p>“This whole predicting the future thing is driving me crazy,” he tells Phil at the end of October, surprising himself. They are sitting near the entrance to the castle and Phil stops ranting about mermaids and looks at him. “Well, Divination’s a load of crap but we all knew that from the beginning. I mean, asking tea leaves about your future? Really?”</p>
<p>“I wouldn’t say that to Marzia,” Phil points out, but Dan waves him away.</p>
<p>“She’ll only agree with me. Trelawney looked in her crystal ball for half a second to tell her in a tragic voice that she’s going to die from the hand of a mysterious Scandinavian man. Everyone in the room knew that she just had a vendetta against Felix because he stole a bundle of lovage from her to have something to smoke at night.”</p>
<p>Phil looks at him in disbelief. “No.”</p>
<p>Dan just shrugs as if saying, <em>you can ask him</em>. Before getting into Trelawney’s cupboard, Felix boasts in every corner about being all cunning and cautious, ready to recite the paragraph on lovage from <em>One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi</em> to anyone doubting his talents, but doesn’t take into account that the healing properties of lovage can backfire if it’s being used incorrectly. Filch has to close the boys’ toilets on the fifth and sixth floors for three days while Felix walks around the castle in a daze, walking into walls and mistaking people for rose bushes.</p>
<p>“But that’s Divination,” Dan continues once Phil stops giggling at Felix’s misfortunes, “but Numerology? At first, we did nothing but talk about how lucky the number three is, but that’s all over the muggle fairy tales as well, so I thought it was just mythology, but they really believe in that! In the magical properties of numbers, I mean,” he adds impatiently, seeing Phil’s confused stare. Phil, in turn, raises an eyebrow.</p>
<p>“So you can potentially turn this rock into a kettle and back without opening your mouth or even looking at it but refuse to believe that the future can be predicted mathematically?”</p>
<p>“I refuse to believe that it can be predicted <em>at all</em>,” Dan corrects him. “This whole thing of ‘looking into the future’ doesn’t make any sense because what is future, anyway? It’s a very vague stretch of time, and are we talking about <em>what-will-happen-in-ten-minutes</em> future or <em>what-awaits-us-in-ten-years</em> future? How can you look into your morning coffee and say with confidence that on that particular day a brick will fall on your head? Or, if we’re still on Numerology, how can you put a letter next to a number and get the weather report for tomorrow? And if I were to turn this rock into a kettle, I wouldn’t be dealing with abstract concepts, I wouldn’t be trying to <em>predict</em> if this rock can turn into a kettle, I wouldn’t consult the stars to see if I can turn this rock into a kettle. It can’t not turn into a kettle because there are serious laws of magic in place and not because some centaur in the forest saw Venus in the sky, multiplied eight by seven and announced that on Friday afternoon Dan Howell will turn this particular rock into a kettle.” For further emphasis, Dan flicks his wand, and the rock in question does become a kettle.</p>
<p>“Looks more like a coffee pot to me,” Phil mutters and gets punched in the shoulder. “You’re taking way too logical of an approach. This whole prediction thing was invented ages ago when people loved to blame their misfortunes on higher powers. Like, if there’s a war, that’s not because we suck at international relations, it’s the stars and you can’t argue with the stars. You can look at Numerology as Divination with equations and diagrams if it makes you feel better. After all, they don’t ask you to blindly follow them; they show you examples from history, all kinds of evidence and theories, but you’re free to draw your own conclusions and have your own opinions.”</p>
<p>The bell rings and Phil rises to his feet and offers his hand to Dan to help him up.</p>
<p>“Will you turn the kettle back into the rock?” he asks. Dan shakes his head.</p>
<p>“Nah. Maybe they’ll make a Portkey out of it someday. Maybe I’ll even see that in my Calming Draught if I’m lucky.”</p>
<p>“If only you could see yourself signing up for the Quidditch team,” Phil says, trying his hardest not to laugh.</p>
<p>“Hey, it wasn’t my fault I missed the trials this year!” Dan starts but Phil’s already running to the greenhouses, shouting something like <em>just like in the last three years</em>, so he heads to Potions, feeling a little bit better.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>December marks the arrival of Nathaniel.</p>
<p>It’s Phil who introduces him to everyone, because Nathaniel transfers from Durmstrang and, despite its dark reputation, somehow ends up in Hufflepuff. Phil just brings him to the Slytherin table on Saturday, and Nathaniel smiles, open yet a bit shy, asking Chris and Dan how they are doing with a subtle foreign accent in his voice.</p>
<p>“Very nice to meet you, yes,” Chris says with the air of importance, not letting go of Nathaniel’s hand which he made the mistake of offering as a greeting. “I hope you’ll like this old girl. Of course, we’re not as blasé about Dark Magic here as you might be used to; I mean, if you <em>Avada Kedavra</em> someone in the halls, you’ll get sent to the Dementor shack, but you’ll get used to the rules. After all, I don’t know what you’re into, maybe for you, the Dementor shack sounds like the best time. Can’t tell you anything about it, unfortunately, I’ve never been. As you’ll come to learn, I’m a good Christian boy, I respect the rules, the last time I got into trouble was in kindergarten, and…”</p>
<p>Phil’s face shows Dan that he regrets not avoiding their table like the plague.</p>
<p>“He’s a bit late, isn’t he?” Dan points out. It’s best to let Nathaniel experience Chris straight away, so he knows what to expect later.</p>
<p>“From what I understood, they really didn’t want to let him go,” Phil shrugs, sending an anxious look to Chris who’s started another story about his angelic innocence. “They’re deathly afraid that someone’ll find out where they are, so they’ve just finished with all the crazy check-ups. They almost made Nat drink Veritaserum to swear that he’d rather die than tell anyone where Durmstrang is.”</p>
<p>Dan feels his eyebrow twitch at that nickname but decides not to pay attention to it.</p>
<p>“Will you come to the Quidditch practice with us?” He changes the subject. Chris swears that he just wants to size up the competition and understand whom Dan will replace next year when he <em>finally</em> signs up, but Dan suspects that he’s just going to make eyes at Joe Sugg to annoy PJ and needs someone to catch him every time he pretends to faint after Joe catches the Snitch. “I need a witness so I can blackmail this idiot over there later.”</p>
<p>Phil’s face twitches. Apparently he already knows what’s going to happen but still shakes his head.</p>
<p>“Sorry. I promised to show Nathaniel around the castle, he needs to have at least somewhat of an understanding before the classes start. I’d take him with me, but I feel like he’s had enough of Chris for now.” Dan doesn’t even need to look at Nathaniel to know that he’s had enough of Chris for the next three months. “Push him in the snow for me, okay?”</p>
<p>Phil grabs Nathaniel by the elbow and tugs him away to the Hufflepuff table, causing Chris to stop mid-sentence to loudly inquire since when it is considered polite to interrupt the conversation of two souls on their way to becoming one. Bloody Baron floats by and suggests himself if he wants a soul to talk to; Chris mutters that he actually isn’t that upset anymore and returns to his eggs with doubled interest. Dan returns to his cereal but keeps glancing towards the Hufflepuff table.</p>
<p>Nathaniel starts feeling right at home very quickly and, according to Dan, charms all his friends <em>way</em> too easily. On Tuesday Dan already overhears Dodie telling Emma, a girl from Slytherin that Dan sits next to at Transfiguration sometimes, how Nathaniel saves her from embarrassment during History of Magic by asking Professor Binns a question that he can’t answer and even lends her his notes at the end of the lesson. On Friday Dan comes across Evan, a bad pun-loving Ravenclaw, who tells him that Nathaniel is enough of a beau to be accepted in Beauxbaton, and has zero desire to react to that joke in any way. A week before Christmas Nathaniel sneaks the second-year Gryffindor Luke into Honeydukes through the statue of the one-eyed witch, and Dan would’ve never given another thought to this story if he didn’t hear it from Phil.</p>
<p>Phil talks about Nathaniel a lot, and the logical part of Dan understands it perfectly: Phil just wants Nathaniel to fit in and tries to do his best to help. They’re in the same House, and Dan constantly sees Phil fixing Nathaniel’s bright yellow tie because he’s still not used to the knot. They work together during Herbology because at the very first lesson Nathaniel almost loses all his fingers to a very angry Snargaluff, and Phil stops sending apologetic glances Dan’s way in three days. Phil takes Nathaniel to meet Larry the Giant Squid, and Dan finds it very hard to believe that it’s just so Nathaniel doesn’t accidentally go swimming in the Lake.</p>
<p>The illogical part of Dan makes him snap when Phil innocently says, “You’ll never guess who cast a <em>Waddiwasi</em> on Peeves on their first try.”</p>
<p>“Let me think, Nathaniel?” Dan grumbles, not even trying to hide the acid in his voice that’s been stewing there for the past few weeks. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Phil frown.</p>
<p>“Actually, it was Dean, but something  tells me that you’d rather have him <em>Waddiwasi</em> Nathaniel.” Dan stares at the magical rowan in his copy of <em>One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi</em> so hard that his eyes start to water.  “Do you have a problem with him?”</p>
<p>“My only problem at the moment is this twenty-five-inch Potions essay, and when it comes to <em>Nathaniel</em>,” Dan underlines something in the book with such force that the page rips, “you’ll have to ask him.”</p>
<p>“Dan.”</p>
<p>Dan hates hearing Phil’s voice like this but he also hates this whole situation in general, so he looks over at his parchment to avoid lifting up his head.</p>
<p>“I’m just tired, okay? I want to finish this until midnight and I’m not really succeeding. I’m not enough of a bookworm to sleep in the library.”</p>
<p>Phil doesn’t smile and doesn’t talk to him for the rest of the evening, and Dan knows that he doesn’t believe him.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>Numerology keeps pressuring Dan into making sense of things that don’t make sense by definition, and he feels his head spin from the questions that no one can give him the answers to. Astronomy, which looked like a fun study of space during the first couple of years, now only amplifies that pressure. They spend the first lesson after the Christmas break listening to Professor Sinistra talk about black holes, and as she creates the illusion of overwhelming darkness with a flick of her wand, Dan can’t tear his eyes away. The dark vortex hypnotises him, swallowing everything too close to it, impenetrable to the light even of a billion stars. The illusion slowly whirls in the air and listening to Professor Sinistra say that no Muggle or wizard still can understand why black holes consume everything in their way, Dan feels one of those holes grow in his chest.</p>
<p>In a couple of weeks, when the sky is finally clear enough, they have a practical lesson on the Astronomy Tower. They look through their telescopes at the stars, writing down names and coordinates, while Professor Sinistra quietly paces behind their backs, correcting mistakes and giving directions. When she tells them to point their telescopes at the Andromeda Nebula, half the class exclaims in wonder and Dan can pretend that he exhaled that sharply for that reason alone. The illusion of a black hole is still clear in his mind and the Andromeda Nebula looks similar to it in shape but consists of nothing but bright white light with hints of blue, gold, and pink visible even in the darkness. It’s surrounded by a sparkling cloud of pale lilac and the stars are shining so bright that Dan has to close his eyes. The realisation of his own insignificance hits him with the force of a thousand bricks and he’s almost surprised to still be standing upright under its weight.</p>
<p>After the lesson ends, he mutters something unintelligible when Chris asks if he’s going back to the common room, but it turns out to be enough because Chris just shrugs and leaves the Tower with everyone else. Dan stops trying to put the case on his telescope and looks up at the sky.</p>
<p>Right now the thought of the infinite universe doesn’t bring fear and gives him something akin to peace instead. Dan looks at the silver lights of the stars and thinks about how little his existence matters. He’s standing on top of a planet, a piece of rock that’s floating around a ball of fire, and nothing he does will ever change it, because everything outside this planet is so far beyond his understanding. He feels like a grain of sand that’s been thrown into the world without any goal or purpose in mind and left at the mercy of fate, an unexplained entity guided by stars, planets, and other higher beings. Dan could’ve dealt with mattering so little in terms of the infinite universe; after all, millions of planets in thousands of galaxies are slowly floating around hundreds of suns, which makes him feel a little less alone. When feelings of insignificance and despair flood his own personal world that’s always been so familiar to him, Dan doesn’t know what to do, and the black hole in his chest aches.</p>
<p>“Dan?”</p>
<p>Dan turns around and under the lonely torchlight, he sees Phil.</p>
<p>“Chris said that he left you up here with ‘the pain of the entire universe’ written on your face,” he answers the question that Dan didn’t ask and walks up to him, careful on the icy tiles. “I thought maybe you’d want to talk.”</p>
<p>Phil stands next to him, and Dan feels warmth radiating from him. They stand in silence, and at first, Dan’s afraid that Phil will try to fill that silence with some mindless chatter, but he doesn’t say anything and Dan spends a few minutes looking at his profile, pale against the dark sky.</p>
<p>“I feel so insignificant.” His voice is quiet, and Dan focuses on the clouds of steam that come out of his mouth with each word. “No matter what I do, the universe doesn’t care. No matter what I do, the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening. No matter where my life goes, the stars will continue to burn out and the planets will keep dying. If I jump from this tower right now the Earth won’t stop spinning, and if I don’t jump it still won’t, and I don’t see the point. What’s the point of existence similar to thousands of others and significant only in its insignificance? What’s the point of all this,” Dan grips the marble railing, “when there is no point? What’s the point in living a life which is just staving off death for seventy years or so? Why do we even exist in this universe that’s too big to care about any of us?”</p>
<p>Dan balls his shaking fingers into fists and listens to Phil’s quiet breathing. It doesn’t settle the raging black hole in his chest but makes it hurt a little less.</p>
<p>Phil is silent for a long time, but this time Dan can’t bring himself to look at him.</p>
<p>“Maybe there is no point in trying to change the universe,” Phil says slowly after what feels like an eternity. “Maybe that’s why it’s so big, so we don’t waste any time trying. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a point in trying to change something that’s closer and more familiar to us.” Phil’s cold fingers touch Dan’s wrist uncertainly. “Maybe, and this is just a suggestion, the point is to try and change <em>someone’s</em> universe.”</p>
<p>Phil squeezes his hand and Dan finally lifts his head.</p>
<p>Phil is standing so close to him that Dan sees in his eyes everything that he’s only dreamt about before. Phil’s eyes are sparkling with something Dan can’t quite put his finger on, and before he manages to lean in to understand, to see, to feel, Phil looks away. It’s a conscious effort to continue breathing, and Dan can swear that now there are more stars in the sky.</p>
<p>Phil keeps squeezing his hand and only then Dan notices that he’s shivering. Dan sees his bare ankles, visible from the pyjama pants with tiny dragons, and it stops being surprising.</p>
<p>“Chris found me in the library,” Phil answers the unasked question again. “Someone had trouble understanding what you’re supposed to do with Plangentine.”</p>
<p>Nathaniel’s name hangs between them, but it takes Dan a few seconds to understand that.</p>
<p>“And you still came?” Dan asks hoarsely.</p>
<p>“He’ll figure it out,” Phil shrugs and intertwines his cold fingers with Dan’s.</p>
<p>The black hole in Dan’s chest doesn’t become the Andromeda Nebula, but he feels the darkness begin to leak out and realises that it’s not really bottomless.</p>
<p>A few days later Dan’s personal world shakes again, but for a different reason entirely. He and Phil return from double Herbology on one particularly windy Thursday in February, when one the eighth floor, all too familiar to them, they stumble upon Chris and PJ, who both are very out of breath and with their hair a mess.</p>
<p>“What are you doing he-...” Phil starts, but Dan has one look at Chris, who looks like a cat next to a bowl of cream, and one look at PJ, who becomes redder by the second and tries to follow the door’s example and fade into the wall, to understand exactly what’s going on.</p>
<p>“No, don’t even think about it,” he interrupts Phil and points an accusing finger at Chris, that looks very pleased with himself. “And you, don’t answer. I don’t want to know. I like sleeping without nightmares, you know?”</p>
<p>“Are you afraid you’ll accidentally learn something new?” Chris smirks. The lack of modesty in his words leads Phil to realise what they’re dealing with and he stares at PJ, who is now the colour that Godrick Gryffindor would be proud of. Deciding that the situation doesn’t need to escalate further, Dan chooses the safest question.</p>
<p>“Why here?”</p>
<p>“You have other ideas?” Chris raises his eyebrows. “Do you want us to pitch a tent in the Forbidden Forest?”</p>
<p>Phil winces. “I never asked you for anything, but please, don’t ruin camping for me.”</p>
<p>“You like camping?” Dan asks, astounded. Phil shrugs like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.</p>
<p>“Dad makes us go every summer. Like, we’re getting closer to nature and learning to be independent, but also we get to start a fire, which is both dangerous and fun.”</p>
<p>“Keep your kinks to yourself, would you,” Chris rolls his eyes. “And I’m sorry, but weren’t you on your way somewhere? I’d make the hint more obvious, but I haven’t lost all faith in your intelligence yet.”</p>
<p>“But haven’t you already… Actually, don’t,” Dan interrupts himself mid-sentence, thinking that one childhood-ruining realisation is enough for today. Deciding that his morals won’t let him tell them to ‘have fun’, he remembers that he has an unfinished star map waiting for him in the common room and grabs Phil by the elbow to take him away before he decides to ask Merlin knows what.</p>
<p>He prefers not to pay attention to Chris that shouts something about getting rid of sexual ignorance and blows kisses their way, while PJ softly but with feeling bangs his head against the shoulder of Barnabas the Barmy.</p>
<p>***</p>
<p>At the end of March, the weather finally allows them to be outside without wearing five layers of clothing but there’s still plenty of snow, so as soon as the weekend comes, Phil drags them out for a snowball fight. Chris immediately chooses PJ to be on his team, saying that he can’t argue with the hand of fate, and Dan gets stuck with Phil but doesn’t really complain. Phil may trip over his own feet and can miss someone’s back from the distance of two feet, but PJ is incredibly competitive and Chris insists on sitting behind the bushes for twenty minutes to discuss strategy which inevitably ends with him running away from the enemy team, screaming something about the untimely betrayal and him being too young to die.</p>
<p>They scatter around the territory of the castle, hiding from the enchanted snowballs behind other students and receiving threats and Trip Jinxes from the most annoyed ones. Less than twenty minutes in Dan doesn’t have a dry spot on him and he’s already accepted the loss of not just his hat but also his dignity, as one of his snowballs flies an inch above PJ’s head and through the see-through form of Professor Binns only to hit Professor Slughorn on the knee, causing him to flail his arms like a terrified chicken and nearly fall into the Whomping Willow.</p>
<p>He and Phil exchange victorious glances once they manage to corner Chris, who’s nowhere else to run but into the Forbidden Forest. Phil doesn’t look that much better than Dan, sweaty and red in the face, and he makes a dozen snowballs float in the air with his wand that’s still somehow intact. Chris claims that he was betrayed and offers to give Tom instead of himself, whose only fault was passing them by, and Phil tries to keep a straight face but breaks down laughing once Chris starts listing the ways in which he’ll make their lives difficult if they don’t immediately let him go. Dan no longer listens to him, distracted by Phil.</p>
<p>Phil is laughing, covering his mouth with his hand, and Dan wants him to drop this habit because he swears that the sun shines brighter every time Phil smiles. He’s already lost his hat and robes somewhere and his yellow Hufflepuff scarf is poking from underneath his jumper, sent to him by Mrs Lester for Christmas. Dan remembers that he has the exact same jumper, only in dark green, and that Phil takes entirely too long to admit that his mother knits those only for members of the family. A gust of wind ruffles Phil’s hair, and he impatiently pushes his fringe off his forehead. His eyes sparkle with excitement and something unrecognisable that makes Dan choke on his breath as he realises that he’s desperately, hopelessly in love with Phil.</p>
<p>A snowball hits him on the head, and everything falls into place. All the jokes that he didn’t get in the past six years suddenly start making sense, the comments about his observation skills rush through his head, and he wants to laugh with relief at his own stupidity. Phil shoots him a mischievous smile and they both dive behind the nearest bush, hiding from the wrath of PJ that’s finally come to save Chris, whose threats are getting more and more intricate.</p>
<p>He’s in love with Phil, Dan thinks, and that’s not the worst thing in the world.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Alternative Chapter Title: Dan Howell and I Almost Got Some Light Touching</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Year Seven</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It is the absolute <em>worst</em> thing in the world.</p><p>The high from the realisation of his feelings for Phil lasts only for a couple of weeks. During that time Dan manages to walk into a wall because Phil smiled, trip over his own (tied) shoelaces because Phil giggled, forget to blink because Phil laughed; he generally acts like a smitten teenager and has to constantly remind himself that it is exactly who he is right now. Soon, however, Dan gets tired of performing <em>Episkey</em> on his own nose three times a day and the rose-tinted glasses fall off, leaving him with a realisation that he’s in love with Phil and Phil has no idea.</p><p>This thought sets up permanent camp in Dan’s mind. He goes back home for the summer holidays and almost tells his mother everything, but in the end, decides against it: he doesn’t need to give her another reason to worry, plus she may think that he was just drugged by some ill-meaning wizards. Phil sends him owls for the entire summer, begging him to come to visit, and by August Dan has no choice but to agree because he sees the Lesters’ family owl more than his own. He gets a bed transfigured for him in Phil’s room again, which causes Martyn to communicate to him in nothing but meaningful glances and suggestive winks until Dan feels brave enough to respond in tow because Martyn is always suspiciously late for breakfast and always comes down straight after Cornelia, who’s also spending her holidays with the Lesters. After that Martyn claps him on the shoulder, calling him ‘a good lad’ which just leaves Dan with more questions, and shows him which floorboards on the second floor creak the loudest, and Dan appreciates the gesture even though he doesn’t really understand how it can help. A few days before they leave for Hogwarts, Mrs Lester sends them to degnome the garden which is followed by a trip to the river, where Dan learns that Phil has a mole above his right clavicle and this fact stays in his mind until well after the first of September.</p><p>Dan doesn’t know if he thought that he’s going to have it easier in Hogwarts, because he isn’t. It turns out that in just three months he manages to forget what it’s like to constantly see Chris and PJ that seem to have lost the last of their shame; Dan quickly loses count of the times he walked in on them in an empty classroom doing something that didn’t leave much for the imagination. He surprises himself by actually considering telling them everything but still gives up on that idea. He’d rather eat nothing but Gillyweed for the rest of his life than admit to those two that they figured something out quicker than he did.</p><p>Still, the question remains. Whenever Dan sees PJ ruffle Chris’s hair and Chris sigh in pleasure while still complaining about his perfect hair being ruined, he just wants to ask <em>how</em>. How did they get the courage to go all the way, how did they manage to tune out that voice that says that it’ll all end badly, how did they manage to just give it a try. But someone’s always around so Dan never gets to ask, and he starts thinking that if he does need to talk to someone, it’s definitely Phil.</p><p>The logical part of Dan says that it’s the right move. After all, this is how all the Muggle fairy tales piled up in his house end, with the hero on top of the fallen beast making a loud and courageous confession of his feelings that moves the object of his affection to tears and finishes with them riding into the sunset on a white horse. But Dan’s life isn’t a fairy tale, and this is the main source of his doubt that he and Phil will end up holding hands and skipping through a daisy field. The fear of rejection is strong enough as it is, but Dan fears for their friendship even more. He’s never had a friend like Phil and he’s not ready to lose that, even if it means keeping his mouth shut.</p><p>Too busy overthinking his every move, Dan completely misses the entirety of September and comes to it only the first Saturday of October to Phil impatiently poking him in the shoulder and telling him to hurry up with his cereal, because Filch’s already started checking the permissions for Hogsmeade and they don’t want to be the last ones there to receive a lecture about disrespecting your elders. Dan loves Hogsmeade, and the weather’s just perfect for wandering around the tiny picturesque streets without sneaking into every other shop for warmth. He forgets about his breakfast and follows Phil who’s almost dancing with excitement.</p><p>They go to Honeydukes first, to buy sweets for Phil’s countless little cousins that’ll come to the Lesters’ house for Halloween. Dan absentmindedly looks over the rows of sugar quills and caramel bombs, unsure what’s going to impress a bunch of five-year-old wizards the most. Tom is standing in the row next to him, blowing giant blue bubblegum bubbles to the excitement of the third-years on their first trip to Hogsmeade, while the shopkeeper is desperately trying to get everyone to behave. Dodie is carefully petting a peppermint toad and Evan, holding a giant bag of liquorice snaps, rolls his eyes and asks what the chocolate frogs need to do to receive the same attention from her. A group of the fifth-years is surrounding a barrel with Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, and Caspar, that transferred from a school in South Africa a few years ago, is claiming that he’s once had two beans tasting like earwax in a row. Once he’s finished looking around, Dan makes his way to the stand with the pepper imps and looks at them questioningly.</p><p>“You think my aunties will appreciate that?” Phil’s voice is right next to his ear and he shivers. “I don’t want to receive angry Howlers about me corrupting their children.”</p><p>Dan swallows because Phil’s standing close, way too close, and he feels Phil’s chin on his shoulder.</p><p>“Then maybe you need to stop trying to lure their children into your van,” he says, his voice thick. Phil laughs quietly.</p><p>“Well, there goes that costume idea. I guess I’ll have to stick with the fizzing whizzbees,” Phil moves on to the safer choice of sweets, leaving Dan to shake his head and try to even out his breathing.</p><p>When they leave Honeydukes, Dan notices that they’re surrounded with an obscene amount of couples. Alfie and Zoe are walking towards them, wearing the same green jumpers, and Zoe’s excitedly talking about the Cerberus puppies that she saw in Magical Menagerie in Diagon Alley while Alfie is looking like he’s ready to agree with her every word even before she opens her mouth. They visit Zonko’s because Phil needs more frog spawn to feed Winston even though it’s practically cannibalism, and Dan sees Jack running away from a seemingly sentient biting kettle; Hazel stops laughing at him just long enough to explain that Jack tried to prove that the kettle can withstand a dozen<em> Depulso</em> thrown at it and failed. Back outside they wave at Bry and Candice who graduated last year and bought a little house on the outskirts of Hogsmeade and see them disappear in the colourful doors of Gladrags Wizardwear. Rose and Rosie run out of the Owlery on the other side of the road, laughing and screaming, “How would <em>you</em> like it if I threw some owl droppings at <em>you</em>?”, and Dan gets a feeling that someone up there is definitely laughing at him.</p><p>“Do you want to go to the Shrieking Shack?” Phil asks, yanking Dan out of his thoughts. “Seeing some ghosts will get us into the Halloween spirit.”</p><p>“There are no ghosts in there, Phil,” Dan rolls his eyes. “The Shack’s been empty for years, and you’re still trying to lure me in with the promises of ghosts.”</p><p>“Maybe they’ll reappear this year. Like, they realised their mistakes and understood there’s no place like home and all that. Come on,” Phil looks at him with eyes full of hope. “We really can’t miss our only chance to see wild ghosts in their natural habitat.”</p><p>Phil spends fifteen minutes running around the Shack and throwing breadcrumbs on the ground and then another ten trying to get the ghosts to come by whispering pspspspsp while Dan is standing next to the hedge and trying to hide the fact that he’s dying from laughter. Phil returns extremely pleased with himself, saying that he felt a spiritual presence because one of the ghosts tripped him, and shoves Dan lightly in the shoulder when he says that it’s very likely that Phil just tripped over his own feet. On their way back to Hogwarts, Phil is ten minutes into describing his detailed plan of catching ghosts next time they visit Hogsmeade when Dan remembers all that he’s seen today and can’t help but wonder what they look like in the eyes of others.</p><p>***</p><p>When Professor McGonagall greets them with, ‘Welcome to your final year’ during their first class, Dan begins to realise that it’s all really going to be over soon. Everyone starts treating him as an adult all of a sudden. Instead of giving him a kind smile and asking him to try again, Slughorn just shakes his head and writes something in his journal when Dan forgets how to stir his Dragon pox cure again. Portraits on the walls start calling him ‘sir’ and ghosts stop him in the halls just to ask his opinion on the dangers of Cornish Pixies, and Dan sees that other seventh-years feel the same. There’s suddenly way too much talk about the future in the Slytherin common room, and during the third discussion on why it’s better financially to breed dragons in Romania than work at Gringotts in two days Dan has to run away to the library, only to see Carrie from Gryffindor who shares that she wants to reads as many books as she can before the graduation and returns to <em>Home Life and Social Habits of British Muggles</em>, putting a curly strand of hair behind her ear. He finds Felix in another section frantically copying the recipe for Polyjuice Potion from <em>Moste Potente Potions</em> and leaves wondering if there’s a single sane person in their year.</p><p>The whole thing just serves as another reminder that he’ll have to say goodbye to something other than just the castle and endless scrolls of homework. Marzia talks more and more about travelling, and her eyes shine extra brightly when Flitwick talks about the fear and respect with which magic is treated in Japan. Jack is spending every free second of his day on his photos and counts the days until he can afford a small studio in the heart of wizarding London. Chris and PJ almost don’t talk at all, just looking at each other with hope and promise, and this leads Dan to understand that there’s a chance that he and Phil will end up going their separate ways.</p><p>Dan doesn’t want to even begin thinking about it, but every other conversation with Phil ends with him ranting about a new veterinary wing opening at St. Mungo’s or gushing about the possibility of going to study Bowtruckles deep in the Scandinavian forests that he reads about in <em>The Daily Prophet</em>. Dan himself still has no idea about what he wants to do with his future. The career talk in his fifth year doesn’t quite go according to plan: Dan barely has the time to say something about Healers when Filch bursts into Slughorn’s office, demanding that two Slytherins be hung from the ceiling in chains for putting Mrs Norris inside a Vanishing Cabinet. Slughorn, of course, immediately retreats to save the poor cat, hastily giving Dan an acid green pamphlet and saying that they’ll have to talk some other time, and that time never really comes. Phil, as it seems, had a much better time talking to Professor Sprout about his career, and Dan sleeps on that thought for two weeks before suddenly deciding that it’s now or never and dragging Phil into an empty classroom after dinner to tell him everything.</p><p>“Not that I don’t like spending time with you, but next time I’d appreciate a warning,” Phil says when Dan closes the door and is tempted to cast <em>Homenum Revelio</em> to see if there’s anyone else in the room. “I don’t even need it in writing or seven business days in advance, it’s the thought that matters.”</p><p>“I need to tell you something,” Dan blurts out, his heart hammering in his chest; no way back now. Phil’s face grows serious and he sits on a desk, looking at Dan.</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>“Well, at first I need you to know that I’m telling you only because I’m a hundred per cent sure that you won’t laugh at me or something; actually, no, I’m about ninety-nine point eight per cent sure, but it’s me being an insecure piece of human and not you, so don’t be offended, okay? But if you do laugh at me, I’ll remember it until the universe explodes, and you know that the universe will never explode, and I’ll tell everyone about your betrayal. ‘Here goes Phil Lester,’ I’ll say. ‘Look at that face and ignore your first impression. He’s the evilest person in the world.’ People will ask me, ‘But, Dan, how could that be?’ and that’s where I’ll tell this tragic tale of trust and betrayal, friendship and feud, laughter and…”</p><p>“Dan.”</p><p>Only hearing Phil’s voice makes Dan realise that he may be rambling just a little bit. He also realises that he’s been nervously circling the classroom and stopped only because Phil caught his wrist.</p><p>“What’s going on?”</p><p>Phil’s fingers are warm and there’s such genuine worry in his eyes that Dan can’t take it anymore.</p><p>“I’m an Animagus,” he says in one breath and braces for the punch.</p><p>The punch never comes, because Phil’s opening and closing his mouth like a fish.</p><p>“Ani-... Are you serious?” he finally manages. Dan still doesn’t have a witty response at the ready so he just shrugs, as if saying, <em>yeah, why wouldn’t I be</em>? “For how long?”</p><p>“Three years now,” Dan admits. “I mean, I started doing all that at the beginning of the fourth year,” he adds hurriedly because something dangerously shifts on Phil’s face. “I couldn’t transform for a very long time, I started looking even remotely like an animal about a month ago.”</p><p>Dan decides not to mention that after his first successful transformation all his clothes mysteriously vanish and he barely manages to get into a spare robe before Chris barges in, yelling, ‘Are you being nasty in here again?’</p><p>Phil shakes his head, as if still in disbelief.</p><p>“An Animagus… But that takes so much time and effort? And didn’t McGonagall say that only the most talented wizards can successfully change their form?”</p><p>Dan nods. Suddenly he can’t look at Phil anymore, afraid that the snarky comments will start any minute now. He hears something akin to the noise of admiration instead.</p><p>“Correct me if I’m wrong, but since you’re still here, it means that you did it.” Dan nods again, still staring at his shoes. “Dan, this is amazing. It’s even more than amazing, it’s,” Phil stutters for a second, “it’s <em>incredibly</em> amazing! You learned to turn into an animal by yourself in the middle of the obscene amount of homework and exams and sharing a room with Chris for nine months out of twelve, and you still think that I’m going to <em>laugh</em> at you?”</p><p>Dan finally lifts his gaze and sees Phil smiling warmly at him with something that looks too much like pride in his eyes. The part about living with Chris reminds him that he’s talking to <em>Phil</em> and that he probably didn’t need to worry that much.</p><p>“Thanks, Phil,” he breathes out, and Phil’s smile widens.</p><p>“Just remind me to stage you an intervention about those dramatic monologues of yours. Really, when you started saying all that I thought you were going to… I don’t even know what I thought you were going to say,” Phil shakes his head as if trying to get his thoughts together. They sit in silence for a few moments, and just when Dan’s about to ask <em>what</em> Phil thought he’s going to say, Phil speaks up again. “Can you show me?”</p><p>The question catches Dan off guard and causes him to nearly fall off the desk.</p><p>“Show you?” he asks hoarsely.</p><p>“Your animal form, I mean,” Phil clarifies as if there’s a universe where Dan didn’t understand that. “I’m by no means pushing you if you still feel like you’re not ready or if you think there’s still a chance that you’ll end up with a tail forever, or even if you’re just not in the mood… Anyway, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” he interrupts himself. “I’m just, you know, curious. You’re an Animagus. And all that. Yes. I’m sorry.”</p><p>It’s Dan’s turn to shake his head because Phil reminds him once again that he has nothing to worry about. Plus, a tiny voice in his head says, this is their last year and there are so many expeditions to the Scandinavian forests out there. Dan sighs and jumps off the desk.</p><p>“Alright, but here’s a couple of rules. Firstly, don’t tell anyone, of course.” Phil solemnly clutches his chest and Dan rolls his eyes. “Show-off. And secondly,” he pauses, not quite knowing how to prepare Phil for what he’s about to see. “Again, just don’t laugh, okay?”</p><p>Before Phil manages to say anything, Dan closes his eyes and focuses on imagining his animal form. Once it’s firmly in his mind, he takes a deep breath, feeling his limbs attacked by thousands of tiny invisible needles. A few minutes later he cautiously opens his eyes: the floor is way closer than he remembers it being and Phil exclaims something unintelligible, so he must’ve succeeded.</p><p>When the initial shock wears off, Dan lifts his head and sees Phil pressing his hand to his mouth in a desperate attempt to keep a straight face. Offended beyond belief, he starts trotting towards the desk with the full intention of biting Phil’s ankle when Phil raises his hands defensively.</p><p>“Sorry, sorry. Jesus, I never thought I’d see an animal look at me with such hatred.” Dan tilts his head to the side as if saying, <em>it’s your own fault</em>. Phil keeps looking at him, and a giggle escapes him against his will. “It’s just,” he takes a deep breath to calm down, “you’re a <em>badger</em>?”</p><p>Dan considers proudly fluffing up his tail and dramatically exiting the classroom. This is exactly what he imagines after seeing himself in the mirror for the first time; after all, what can be funnier than a Slytherin turning into a Hufflepuff animal? Of course, later on, Dan reads about how badgers symbolise the desire to fight for what’s right and the ability to remain calm in stressful situations, but that happens only after he realises that he can never change his animal form and thinks of all the jokes he’ll have to endure if he ever decides to share this with someone.</p><p>Phil returns him to the present moment with a simple phrase.</p><p>“You’re so <em>adorable</em>.”</p><p>Dan doesn’t quite have the time to understand if he’s misheard or not, because Phil lowers to the floor next to him and looks at him with a mix of amazement and disbelief. There’s something else in his eyes, but Dan is distracted by Phil reaching out his hand.</p><p>“Can I?” he whispers.</p><p>Luckily, Dan manages to nod only once and not embarrass every actual badger out there, and he tries to relax, willing the fur on his neck to stop sticking out in anger. When Phil’s tentative fingers touch his back, he closes his eyes and thanks both Merlin and Morgana that the animals from the Mustelidae family are unable to blush.</p><p>Phil’s confidence grows, and after a few awkward pets, he runs his fingers through Dan’s fur and Dan shudders, hoping it won’t make Phil stop. It seems like Phil hasn’t even noticed, still entranced by the movement of his fingers through the black-and-white fur. When Phil briefly scratches behind his ears, Dan makes a noise embarrassingly close to purring and kicks himself for not being able to keep the infamous badger cool. The kick proves to be useless because Phil’s still looking at him like he’s the eighth wonder of the world, and Dan reluctantly decides that this has to stop. Thinking that he has all the time in the world to blame his animal instincts on the desire to get some belly scratches, he shakes Phil’s hand off and turns back into a human, not giving himself time to regret this decision.</p><p>“You already have Winston for that,” he says, like an excuse. This makes Phil snap out of his trance and stop looking at him with something strange in his eyes.</p><p>“I’d introduce you to Winston. You could give him rides on your back.”</p><p>Dan imagines a touch of cold paws on his neck, and after Phil’s fingers, it seems especially horrible.</p><p>“Nope. Not in this life.”</p><p>“You don’t know what you’re disagreeing with,” Phil says, always ready to defend Winston’s honour. “He knows this castle better than the Marauders’ Map, and you could bring me sweets from Honeydukes.”</p><p>“You’re always thinking about yourself,” Dan rolls his eyes and pokes Phil in the side. Phil smiles.</p><p>“I’d share them with you.”</p><p>Dan shrugs, as if saying, <em>whatever you say</em>, and leans his head back against the wall. Maybe in the future, the transformation won’t leave him so drained but right now he feels too tired to even move. He should really get up and go to his common room, but sitting in the dark classroom next to Phil is too nice, so he tells himself that five minutes won’t change anything.</p><p>When Dan starts actually falling asleep, Phil speaks again.</p><p>“You know, I have something to show you too.” Dan hears the rustling of robes next to him and a sigh of concentration. “<em>Expecto Patronum</em>!”</p><p>Dan manages to lift his heavy eyelids just in time to want to rub his eyes in wonder. A silver cloud erupts from Phil’s wand, floating up to the ceiling and taking the form of a giant owl. It spreads its wings and circles the room in a gust of warm wind before dissipating in the air, leaving a bunch of sparks behind.</p><p>Dan looks from the ceiling to Phil, who’s worrying his wand between his fingers, and back.</p><p>“Are you being serious right now?” Dan’s voice doesn’t even sound like his own.</p><p>“I had some extra classes with Flitwick,” Phil smiles a little at his reaction. “He said it’ll give me extra points at O.W.L.s if I horrendously fail at Cheering Charms. And I managed to get an ‘E’ even without it, so it never really came up.”</p><p>“Are you being serious right now?” Dan repeats once he’s able to speak again. “You can conjure a Patronus? I mean, an actual, not-just-a-pile-of-dust Patronus?” Phil nods, clearly amused by the situation. Dan shoves him. “You can conjure a corporeal Patronus and it <em>never really came up</em>?”</p><p>“Well, it came up now?” Phil tries. Dan sends him a murderous glare, and he sighs, “Fine, I was busy, you know how much we have to do right now. And then I forgot about it. Happy?”</p><p>Dan decides that Phil’s confession that he forgot about being able to conjure a Patronus is equal parts hilarious and believable, so he just shoves him once more and shakes his head.</p><p>“How did you manage to do it?” he asks. Phil shrugs.</p><p>“I don’t know, really. There was nothing for a long time, no sparks even, and I was trying to think of a clever way not to come to the classes anymore when Pea flew out of my wand.”  Dan isn’t even surprised, because <em>of course</em>, Phil named his Patronus, a giant owl, <em>Pea</em>. “She was just a shadow at first, of course, but she was getting stronger very quickly. Flitwick said that I found a very good memory, otherwise she wouldn’t be able to protect me even from a cockroach. Got lucky, I guess.”</p><p>Dan wants to ask what is the memory when Phil coughs and looks at the ground. “I can teach you if you want. Now that you know that I can.”</p><p>Dan thinks that there are no bad decisions to be made today and gets his wand out of his sleeve. Phil claps his hands happily.</p><p>“Hooray! We’ll take over Azkaban together!” Dodging another poke, he adds, “If we need to, of course. Okay, you’ve already heard the spell. Can you repeat it for me?”</p><p>“<em>Ex-Expecto Patronum</em>,” Dan says, stuttering a little over the unfamiliar words. “Done.”</p><p>Phil rolls his eyes but continues, “Now you need a memory. And not just any memory, but a very happy one, so that your day immediately becomes better when you think about it. It may take a while.”</p><p>Dan looks at the wall and thinks. Phil’s right: a big sandcastle that he and Adrian built on the beach in Spain a year before he went to Hogwarts and a perfectly round cloud that he saw last winter don’t bring him anything other than a faint feeling of satisfaction. Angry at his mind for being unable to come up with anything good, he closes his eyes, hoping to concentrate, and hears Phil’s voice again.</p><p>“You don’t need to hurry. Eventually, you’ll find what you’re looking for.”</p><p>His words echo in Dan’s head, and his mind, thankful for the distraction, reminds him of the first time he and Phil met. Dan sees eleven-year-old Phil that looks at him, mouth wide open in wonder, as he tells him about his parents’ Muggle jobs. He turns into Phil that drags him out of the library to go look for the Mirror of Erised and that convinces him to come close to and even pet a hippogriff. Phil that tried to dye his hair with magic once and spent the entire weekend in the hospital wing with a bright green head becomes Phil that tells him that the Boggart pretending to be his parents didn’t say a word of truth and that holds his hand while Dan talks to him about being scared by his own insignificance. Dan opens his eyes and sees the real Phil looking at him, and his heart is filled with something so warm that it cannot be anything other than happiness. Although Dan probably could give it another name.</p><p>He grips his wand.</p><p>“<em>Expecto Patronum</em>!”</p><p>His words don’t conjure a gracious creature and it doesn’t fly around the room, like Phil’s owl, before disappearing. A formless grey shadow leaks out of his wand instead, disappearing without a trace not even seconds later, but Phil still looks at it like Dan just conjured a snow-white unicorn.</p><p>“Wow,” he breathes out and Dan forgets to remind him that practically nothing happened. “It took me three weeks to get to that. That’s one hell of a memory you found.”</p><p>Dan looks him in the eyes and hopes that he won’t need to say anything.</p><p>“Do you want to try again?” Phil asks quietly. He’s so close that for a second Dan allows himself to <em>hope</em>, but at that moment the door flies open and reveals Professor McGonagall.</p><p>“Gentlemen,” she says, displeased, looking at them through her glasses, “I am the first one to applaud your thirst for knowledge, but it should be acted upon during classes and not after hours. Minus ten points for Hufflepuff and Slytherin. Now off to your dormitories!”</p><p>They quickly get up and leave the classroom, muttering apologies under their breath. Phil waves at him from the stairs, looking slightly guilty, but Dan thinks about having fewer secrets and just smiles back at him, feeling no regrets at all.</p><p>***</p><p>The decision to have the whole Animagus conversation over and done with turns out to be the right one, because soon Dan starts to think of that evening as the last time when he had time to do something other than burying himself in a pile of books. He can’t even commend himself on that because that would require thinking about it, and the calendar on his bedside table suggests that he should use his head for other things. They start spending their days in the library again, and Dan doesn’t remember when was the last time that he saw Phil without a particularly angry-looking <em>Monster Book of Monsters</em> and that Chris slept in his own bed and not using a copy of <em>Theories of Transubstantial Transfiguration</em> as a pillow. </p><p>Dan guesses that it’s the Easter break when Madam Pince starts insisting they study at the Lake, shaking her head every time they return one pile of books only to immediately check out another. Whenever he looks away from <em>The Book of Charms and Spells</em> to rub exhaustion out of his eyes, he sees the same thing: Felix shooting jealous looks at the carefree second-years and angrily muttering something in Swedish, PJ trying to simultaneously study the principles of turning liquids into solids and write a Potions essay, and Chris practising Protego on butterflies. At the end of April, Phil forgets to take an extra piece of toast from breakfast and shouts his apologies at the Giant Squid that swims away to the other side of the Lake, offended, and that’s the only thing that reminds Dan that there’s still more to life than just their upcoming exams.</p><p>Once May starts, the teachers seem to have finally caught the N.E.W.T.s stress they’ve all been having because the classes change drastically. Slughorn gets into revision, pulling up quizzes on the first year material, and Dan starts seeing students suddenly go pale and clench a bottle of the Calming Draught in their fingers. Flitwick insists on theory being easier than practice, so the Charms classes become a menagerie of frogs, crows, and mice that need to be silenced, then convinced to quack, then forced to dance, and Dan can only agree with Marzia who’s complaining about having nightmares; his own dreams have been filled with an army of angry amphibians out for his blood. At Transfiguration, the only class that manages to keep some structure, he hears about Professor Trelawney predicting failure and a life of shame to those poor souls who decided to take Divination for their N.E.W.T.s and takes a second to thank the higher powers for telling him to drop Divination right after his fifth year.</p><p>Exam preparations seem like hell already but turn out to be just purgatory. Once the exam schedules come out, everyone silently agrees that the real fun is only just about to start.</p><p>“Tell me, if I jump from the Astronomy Tower right about now, can I not come to History of Magic at eight in the morning?” Chris muses and Dan doesn’t laugh because he sort of wants to ask the same question.</p><p>“I doubt that’ll get you out of Charms theory at three in the afternoon,” he responds gloomily and looks back at the colour-coded names on his piece of parchment. It promises that everything will be over in two and a half weeks.</p><p>Theoretical exams bring Dan about as much joy as he imagines, and that is none. At the Transfiguration exam, he breaks his quill by pressing it too hard into the parchment, and he’s immediately led out of the Great Hall and accused of trying to cheat and breaking the precious charmed quills. It turns out, however, that an elder examiner forgot to even charm the quills against cheating and Dan is issued a quick apology while the exam is interrupted for ten minutes to let the irritated professors set everything right. History of Magic and Charms happen in the same day and blur together, causing Dan to worry that he might’ve written that the Disillusionment charm was invented by the goblin ruler Ulrik the Eighth, but he’s too tired to dwell on it for too long. There’s not a single question on black holes at Astronomy, and when he heads to Ancient Ruins the morning after, his head is surprisingly clear.</p><p>“If I don’t get out of Potions alive tomorrow, tell my family I want a fancy funeral,” Chris wails at the end of the second week when they have only three exams left. “That includes the best spot in the cemetery, a velvet casket, and a marble gravestone that says <em>he’s in a better place now because there are no exams in Heaven</em>.”</p><p>“How can you be sure that we won’t fall victim to the wizarding education system as well?” PJ asks. Chris pats his head patronisingly.</p><p>“You’re simply not allowed to do that, my dear Peej, because I need to come back to haunt someone after my untimely tragic death.”</p><p>They start arguing about how many rebelling against the education system ghosts can one friend group have, and Dan looks at Phil who’s taking a nap on <em>Advanced Potion-Making</em> and thinks about things that make him want to survive the remaining exams.</p><p>The last exam on Dan’s schedule is Numerology and he stops caring about the results as soon as he closes the classroom door behind him. There hasn’t been a day this year when he didn’t regret choosing that subject, so now even a dozen ‘T’s won’t ruin his mood because he never has to open <em>New Theory of Numerology</em> and listen to Professor Vector talk about magical properties of sudoku puzzles ever again. He looks at his watch; he probably still has time to catch Phil before lunch. Phil’s having his practical Care of Magical Creatures exam and Dan wants to be the first to know if he got bitten by Nargles or not.</p><p>To his surprise, Phil’s already standing at the entrance to the castle, not looking injured in the slightest. Dan’s just about to ask him about that when Phil blurts out, “I love you. Not in a friendly way. I mean, very much in a friendly way, but more than a friend. I’m in love with you. That. So much.”</p><p>Dan freezes with words in his mouth, feeling like someone’s cast a <em>Confundus</em> on him. He slowly closes and opens his eyes and Phil’s staring at him with such desperate hope in his eyes that the world around them comes to a stop. An inkwell falls out of Dan’s hand, and the silence ringing in his ears shutters into a million pieces.</p><p>“Oh, Phil,” he breathes out and steps forward to finally, <em>finally</em> kiss him.</p><p>Phil’s lips are warm, just like his fingers that are sliding in Dan’s hair, just like his eyes that Dan loses himself in on that very first day in Diagon Alley, and Dan pulls away just enough to murmur, <em>me too, god, me too</em> before kissing him again. Before he can freak out that Phil can’t hear or understand him, Phil loops his arms around his neck and rubs his nose against his cheek, exhaling with such relief that Dan feels like right now his Patronus would be capable of grinding Azkaban into dust.</p><p>Dan rests his head against Phil’s shoulder and just breathes. Phil smells like freshly mown grass and the sun, and he can worry about the rest of the world later.</p><p>***<br/>
When they enter the Great Hall, Phil’s holding his hand.</p><p>“Jesus <em>Christ</em>,” Chris groans, and Dan can’t be bothered to fight the undoubtedly dumb smile spreading on his face. “I can’t believe you’ve managed to sort yourselves out before I turned completely grey.”</p><p>“Shut up,” Phil tells him, his ears a delicate shade of pink. Chris considers dramatically faceplanting into his own plate, but it still has traces of ketchup so he resorts to simply shaking his head.</p><p>“I told you we needed to have a bet! By now I would’ve won so much money that I could afford a medium-sized palace!”</p><p>“Too bad I’m a good person and refused to try and profit off of my friends’ stupidity,” PJ says smugly and pokes Dan in the side. Dan has to remind himself that it’s still too early to be offended by ‘stupidity’.</p><p>“But I would’ve let you live in it,” Chris whines. PJ rolls his eyes and tells him to hurry up because he sees Nearly Headless Nick and the exam period always puts him in the mood to talk about his death.</p><p>Dan squeezes Phil’s hand and smiles.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thank you so much for reading! Come say hi on Tumblr: <a href="https://www.tumblr.com/blog/donchushka">donchushka</a>.</p><p>Alternative Chapter Title: Dan Howell and The Happy Ending That Only Took Seven Chapters.</p>
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